The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  In late 1976, and completely independent from what was going on with Carl and the Voyager team, Yale professors Willie Ruff and John Rogers had approached Laurie with the idea of using a computer to realise Kepler’s vision. Laurie was the perfect person at the perfect time. In the mid-1970s she had been discussing with her Bell Labs superior Max Mathews the idea that, just as visual display of scientific data using then-brand-new computer graphics was shedding new light on that data, perhaps it would be possible to gain different insights from an audio display of scientific data.

  ‘So when Willie had suggested realising Kepler’s idea, it was already right up my alley and it completely made sense for me to do it … His idea of astronomical phenomena being made audible was a natural for me to want to try, and the computer made it possible, providing a bridge between physical reality and audio, with math as the translating Rosetta Stone.’

  Willie gave Laurie some astronomical data on the motions of the planets, and Laurie set to work: ‘I immersed myself in the project, read books by and about Kepler, re-researched the astronomical data because I needed much higher-precision numbers than John and Willie provided, wrote the software, configured the hardware,4 tried a variety of possible ways of interpreting what Kepler had written, and then, over several months, I generated and recorded the sounds the way I felt sounded most musical of the possibilities I had tried, and gave Willie a high-quality recording.’

  In this planetary polyphony Mercury is represented by the highest note, Saturn the lowest. Laurie used only the six planets that were known during Kepler’s lifetime. She told me: ‘I’d rather not get too technical here, but I programmed each planet as a periodic function using the FORTRAN IV language on a DDP-224 mid-1960s computer. Once I had decided on the timbre and treatment of the sounds and a rate at which time (planetary motion) would proceed relative to listening time, I chose the astronomical date of 0 January 1977 as a starting point and let the program run off 100 years of sound at the rate of 20 seconds per Earth year.’

  Job done, the Yale professors put out a press release, and the ‘Music of the Spheres’ won some extended coverage in the New York Times (22 March 1977), which is presumably where Carl or one of the team heard about it before then calling Bell Labs. Laurie was immediately ‘excited and honoured’ that her piece was being considered. And she set to work, eventually submitting a new version of the piece on a quarter-inch, stereo, open-reel audio tape. ‘Carl Sagan’s team only included on the Voyager record a very small part of [my] recording. There was quite a lot of other material to pack onto that gold disc. I felt honoured to be placed at the opening of the “Sounds of Earth”.’

  She thinks that Carl and the team may have hoped that the audible trajectories of the six planets might ultimately act as an identifier of our home solar system were intelligent extraterrestrials ever to find it: ‘There turn out to be many stars with planets in the habitable zone, but it’s extremely unlikely that any will have six that move in these same ratios. This is a sonic picture of the inner six planets of Voyager’s unique home solar system – sort of a cosmic fingerprint.’

  Laurie’s right that they did only use a fairly short excerpt. It’s hardly a commercial toe-tapping unit shifter – frankly, it would sit very happily in the John Carpenter songbook, with its cold, detached menace – but it is an interesting mathematical experiment, and a thought-provoking way to kick off the ‘Sounds of Earth’ segment of the record. It’s surprising that it isn’t more widely known.

  ‘I never considered it a musical composition of my own,’ says Laurie. ‘I didn’t originate this work. It’s a realisation, a sort of a long-delayed quasi-performance of Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi, his idea that the movements of the planets could be heard as music only by the ear of God … It had remained theoretical, a mere concept. Then it became possible to render it accurately into audible sound with the development of digital computers and their evolution into sound-creation tools. It was, in some ways, as much of an honour as inclusion in the Voyager mission simply to be the first person to ever hear what Kepler described and then to share with other ears what Kepler never got to hear himself, what he wrote so long ago, hoping that someone would someday be able to listen to the sounds he theorised.’

  Laurie sits within a line of pioneers, minimalists and inventors, from Bebe and Louis Barron (The Forbidden Planet soundtrack) to Delia Derbyshire, Dick Mills and John Baker (BBC Radiophonic Workshop), to Éliane Radigue, Wendy Carlos, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, Suzanne Ciani, Phillip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Tangerine Dream, Robert Moog, the whole krautrock crowd, Brian Eno… You’ll find her work in compilations celebrating pioneers of the time – The Early Gurus of Electronic Music features 1974’s ‘Appalachian Grove’, for example. And alongside compositions, Laurie also developed the ‘Music Mouse’ in 1986, an early ‘intelligent-instrument’ designed for home computers, allowing diverse ways of generating melodies and harmonies from gestures.

  I guess what I’m saying is, if Brian Eno or Philip Glass had worked on ‘Music of the Spheres’, I feel we’d all know about it. But they didn’t. Laurie Spiegel did, and I think she rules. So go check out ‘Music of the Spheres’, and once you’ve done that, go listen to Laurie’s The Expanding Universe album. It’s fabulous.

  In any event, her boss Max Mathews was delighted that something created in his department would be on board a spacecraft, and he taped up an article about it from the in-house Bell Labs Record on the wall of his workspace.

  ‘I am asked about it intermittently,’ she says. ‘Usually just when there is news about the mission. That’s less and less frequently now they’ve reached the outer edges of the heliosphere. It still feels like quite an honour, and it’s even still hard to believe. Something that I, a mere tiny being on the Earth’s surface, made is among the very first human creations to travel beyond the solar system. It’s hard to even wrap my mind around that having happened.’

  ***

  The Voyagers aren’t ever going to land anywhere. Assuming they don’t get hit by anything, they will drift in a vast orbit around the Milky Way. They’ll be forever in deep space. Therefore, any civilisation with the technology to traverse deep space and find either of the Voyagers should also have no problem in turning an audio signal into a video image. That was the idea at least.

  If one of the Voyager records is ever found and decoded, the first image to appear will be a circle. This was another suggestion that originated from Philip Morrison at MIT. He felt a simple geometric shape would be a good way to start the picture sequence – a handy primer for the aliens to test their hardware.

  In the end, the team chose a circle as their calibration shape because, unlike a square, it could be used to confirm the correct ratios of height and width in the picture raster5 at the same time. Plus, it was designed to neatly work with what Frank had in mind for the record cover.

  Frank had been kicking around a number of ideas for the metal casing of the record. They needed something that indicated to an alien being that what was behind the metal box was significant, and that would explain how to use and interpret the contents. We’ll explore the cover in more detail nearer launch, but in the meantime, the metal case would be adorned with Frank’s Pioneer pulsar map; a schematic of a hydrogen atom; visual instructions about how to play the record, showing stylus, grooves, spin rate and direction; and a sequence of drawings indicating how photographs should be reconstructed from the audio signals.6 Next follow diagrams designed to communicate the correct aspect ratio of each image, and then a final picture of a circle. So, putting ourselves in the consciousness of some alien technician many thousands or millions of years hence, once a perfect circle appears on their screen, they know they’re doing it right, and they will note that it corresponds to the image of the circle on the casing of the artefact.

  Next in the picture sequence comes the pulsar map, showing our position in relation to pulsar stars. The map is a spiky affair, as each pulsar is represented as a ser
ies of binary lines indicating the rate of the pulsar, coming out from a central black circle. They wanted to include the whole map, but soon realised that the nature of their weird TV-signal to LP-record format wouldn’t result in clear enough resolution to render the binary code of the map. But Frank was definitely committed to using the map on the record’s cover, and so was keen to get it on the record in some form – it would again be another clue for the recipients that they were doing it right. The solution was to include a photograph showing just a partial section of the pulsar map, enough to be recognisable, with an inserted picture of the Andromeda galaxy. It was thought this could also serve as a useful signpost or reference point – the shape of the galaxy, which itself will change over time, could provide a clue about very roughly when the record came from.

  None of this, however, was getting them any closer to the aforementioned problem of scales of distance, weight and time. They could use a dot to indicate one, but one what? They could define binary notation, then spell out 100 … but 100 what? They needed some kind of mathematical key, some kind of unit.

  The ‘hydrogen line’ is the electromagnetic radiation spectral line that is created by a change in the energy state of neutral hydrogen atoms. I don’t really know what that means either, but as it’s universal, is observed frequently in radio astronomy, and is exactly 21cm in length, it seemed a logical fit for the problem. It gives the recipient who understands what Frank is getting at, a unit of measurement of 21cm.7

  In the Golden Record version of binary, a vertical line stands for ‘1’, a horizontal line for ‘0’. Images three and four in the sequence are the keys to the city – a series of mathematical and physical unit definitions, simple diagrams, written out on white paper. Image three (directly following the calibration circle and the partial pulsar map) starts with a single dot, which equals ‘|’ (binary) or ‘1’ (base 10). Meanwhile two dots equals ‘|-’ (binary) or ‘2’ (base 10). It goes on, building up to more complex forms, showing that one-third plus one-fifth is equal to eight fifteenths, for example. They wanted enough sums and examples of mathematical form and notation that a recipient could hopefully grasp what the symbols meant, but also have back-ups to test their hypothesis.

  Image four is the physical unit conversion table. It starts with a diagram of the hydrogen atom undergoing a change of energy states – a change that emits radiation at a particular frequency. This is shown essentially by two circles, with a few dots and lines to indicate transition, and a wavy line. Its mass is shown as 1M, and then it gives the frequency of the emitted radiation (1t) and the wavelength (1L). So hydrogen has given the alien a unit of mass (M), time (t) and length (L). And the rest of image number four takes these units and ramps them up to usable figures, translates them for use in the coming picture sequence.

  The hydrogen atom has provided us with a universal unit of time. A single ‘t’ is the time it takes the hydrogen atom to do its stuff. And, because this is such a tiny fraction of a second, below the atom symbols we have this unit converted up to one second. It’s basically saying that a boat-load of these tiny ‘t’s equals a second.8 Below that we learn that 86,400 of these ‘s’ thingies equals a ‘d’ – a day. Then we discover that 365 days equals 1 ‘y’.

  Next comes the hydrogen length, L, converted to a centimetre. So as the hydrogen line is 21cm, this is a nice easy one: 1/21L equals one centimetre, which is then expressed as a metre and a kilometre.

  Finally the picture repeats this trick with the ‘M’ – showing how many hydrogen ‘M’s would equal a gram, then a kilogram. They then invented a brand-new unit of measurement expressed as an ‘e’. An ‘e’ was one Earth’s mass. So, having defined one gram, they defined one ‘e’ as six times 10 to the power of 27 grams.

  Jon Lomberg also wrote about this, summing up all the above rather neatly: ‘A diagram showing a stylised hydrogen atom. Units of mass, length, and time have been defined in terms of the hyperfine transition of hydrogen – how much hydrogen weighs (M), how fast the transition happens (t), and the wavelength of the radiation produced in the transition.’

  I’ll admit, because I’m not a physicist, chemist, mathe­matician or radio astronomer, my brain becomes a little foggy with all this stuff. The hydrogen key has attracted criticism over the years for its complexity, but it’s important to remember that the finders of Voyager 1 and 2 are going to be space-travellers, meaning they should have the tools to interpret the symbols correctly. The undoubted genius of all this is that – using a circle, some small lines, a few dots and a wavy line – Frank gave them a key. From these hydrogen units they could now express length, mass and even time on the photographs that were to follow.

  ***

  The suggestion to include a series of photographs of bodies from our solar system came from Canadian astrophysicist A.G.W. Cameron. The rendering of three-dimensional objects in two dimensions might be an unfamiliar concept to aliens, so it was felt that some pictures of planets and a star was a nice friendly way to begin the image sequence. They provide some common ground, objects that would be familiar to space-faring aliens.

  Having given the alien record collector a unit of measurement, Frank next cracked on with a diagram of the solar system. Remember the recipients who had followed the clues, and understood that this earthling centimetre was 1/21L of the hydrogen line, now understood kilometres. They also had a time stamp derived from the frequency of the hydrogen wavelength, and a rough measurement of mass measured in a new unit – one ‘e’, or ‘earth’. So next Frank drew up a complete guide to the planets of our solar system, showing diameter and mass. It’s a very simple diagram, the kind you might find in any astronomy textbook, but because of the relatively poor TV-quality resolution in this record format, they had to be spread across two images. The first shows the Sun (whose mass is expressed as 333,000 earths), and the four inner planets, all with diameter, distance from the Sun, mass and the rate of a single rotation. The second shows Jupiter, the rest of the gas giants, and of course Pluto (this was long before its declassification).

  The first photograph to follow the solar system diagrams is a composite from the Hale Observatory, showing the Sun through various filters and revealing the surface of the Sun, its sunspots and more. These are followed by images showing Mercury’s acned face, Mars, Jupiter and Earth, taken from space. Again, the images include the mass and diameter, thereby tying in with the solar system chart information from just before.

  You may be asking yourself: ‘This is all very well, but exactly how did they get photographs onto a metal record?’ It’s a good question. It was Frank’s job to figure out exactly how to do it. He knew from the beginning it was possible in theory – no problem at all with the theory – but the practical how-to was a little more tricky. For a start, no one was doing it. There was really no need to transfer pictures to an ordinary vinyl disc, let alone a metal one.

  First they had to find some kind of hardware that could convert picture into sound. For those of a certain age, the old dial-up internet sound might be as good a sound as any to have in mind while thinking about this. The sound of data. More specifically, they needed something that would convert television/video pictures to the lower-frequency signals that could successfully be transferred to a record.

  The man who solved the problem was Valentin Boriakoff, another star running back of the Voyager story. Val, as he was more widely known, was born October 1938 in Argentina. He graduated from the University of Buenos Aires in 1963, serving as an electronics engineer at the Argentine Radio Astronomy Institute before migrating to the US, where he first worked at Green Bank, entering Cornell’s graduate programme in 1967, receiving his PhD in 1973. In 1977 he was a research associate at the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center. Indeed, according to Frank, he was one of their star designers. So Frank dropped the problem in Val’s lap, while the rest of the team carried on finding pictures, working on the diagrams and cover designs.

  It was while flicking through an electronics
directory that Val came across the name of a small company called Colorado Video. Not only had they developed a machine that could transfer video image to sound just as required (a 321 Video Analyzer), but they had built a computer around the machine to run it. Frank writes in Murmurs how Colorado Video had been working on the technology, convinced that someday people would want to send pictures via telephone wires.9 Anyway, it all looked perfectly possible. Not only that, but it seemed as if each picture would take up much less time on the record than the original estimates, meaning the number of images could go up yet again.

  ‘Nobody had ever done it before,’ says Jon. ‘This is not a laser disc or a digital disc. Nobody had ever put pictures on an LP. Frank came up with the idea of using video signals … and also solved the problem of how do you show colour. How do you provide any way that the aliens can reassemble the pictures in accurate colour? Another conceptually very, very difficult challenge. He came up with a solution that in the intervening years a number of scientists, including cognitive psychologists who study vision, have looked at and concluded that it was actually a pretty smart way to do it.’

  This is how they tackled colour photographs. Within the fabric of the final record, if you popped it on your own turntable at home and played the picture sequence, the black-and-white images would each come as a single burst of data – a single burst of sound – while the colour images would occur in triplets – three bursts in a row. And a little like old analogue TVs would have those three coloured dots at the centre when you switched them off, showing the constituent parts of the picture, so this record would ‘play’ the amounts of red, blue and green for each image.