The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

  The Japanese speaker, Mari Noda, is now a professor at Ohio State University. She was 25 at the time, had graduated from Cornell in 1975 and was working as an undergraduate teaching assistant.

  ‘It seemed like a rather fantastic idea – so, so remote from our daily routine,’ she says. ‘The recording itself was quite simple. It was done in the basement language-lab studio, just like all the language-material recordings being done at the time. Later, when I heard some other greetings that my fellow recorders had made in other languages, I was astonished that they were quite lengthy. I was told to just say hello, so that’s what I did. I clearly didn’t comprehend what “greeting” meant back then. As a Japanese woman of the eligible age but without any prospect of marriage in sight, a strange thought did occur to me: what if some being from outer space “called”, seeking lifetime partnership with me – or, by the time that would happen, more likely with one of my descendants – just because they were intrigued by my voice? How long would their “lifetime” be? Well, so far, no signs of such contact. I have a daughter who is about to start college, so I had better warn her.’

  Even as the recording sessions were going on, they were still trying to find and recruit new speakers of languages not yet represented. People there to record one language often suggested a name of someone who might be able to speak another. This led to many people turning up very last minute.

  An architecture student named Andrij Cehelsky voiced the Ukranian greeting. He was 23 and had just graduated from an intensive five-year architectural programme at Cornell. ‘I stayed in Ithaca that summer to photograph my drawings and assemble an architectural portfolio, to unwind and just enjoy Ithaca. There was a small group of us architects doing this, it was pleasant and low-stress.’

  Andrij (pronounced like Andre, but with a long e) was surprised when he received the call from Linda Sagan, asking if he would be interested in saying a few words in Ukrainian: ‘I remember the phone going in my little kitchen – what an exciting moment! Though I had taken Sagan’s “Introduction to Astronomy” course just before in the spring of 1977 and understood the gravity of the project, I did not see this coming.’

  He agreed immediately. He called his mum in Rochester to talk it over, and contemplated a message that might include some verse by the great 19th-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko. However, as Linda had emphasised that it should be short, his final words included ‘щастя, здоров’я і многая літа’ (‘wishing happiness/good fortune, health and many years’) – a common phrase Ukrainians use when sending birthday wishes. He describes his recording session the following day:

  ‘I registered, signed a sworn statement – signing off to NASA all rights of the recording, submitted a hand-printed copy and translation of my greeting. When my turn came, I went into the recording room, sat in front of a microphone and recorded the greeting. I cannot recall if we did multiple takes. That was it! I walked back to my apartment, slowly comprehending what had just transpired.

  ‘Though born in the US, I grew up speaking Ukrainian as well as English. Ukraine had been absorbed into the Soviet Union after the Second World War and became a captive nation. No free press, no free representation in the outside world. The Ukrainian language was deliberately marginalised while Russian was promoted. There were no Ukrainian foreign students at Cornell, and Ukraine’s seat in the UN was just another vote for the Soviets. So the Ukrainian diaspora worked hard to preserve the language, culture and historical memory. In that context, besides representing our planet, I was also representing Ukrainians who did not have a free voice in 1977.’

  The Cornell greetings are utterly charming. In the end the team far exceeded the 25-language target, with a rapid-fire, smash-and-grab operation that bagged 55. In Murmurs you can see the results as a table showing the language, the name of the speaker, the comments in that language, an English translation, then a rough approximation of the number of human beings on the planet who spoke that language.

  There were some disappointments, however. There were no-shows and gaps that the team just ran out of time to fill – there is, for example, no Swahili greeting – but what they did get was an unscripted array of idiosyncratic warmth. The Indonesian speaker, Ilyas Harun, says: ‘Goodnight, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time.’ Jatinder N. Paul, speaking Punjabi, says: ‘Welcome home. It is a pleasure to receive you.’ Stella Fessler, speaking in Cantonese says: ‘Hi. How are you? Wish you peace, health and happiness.’ The Mandarin greeting, spoken by Liang Ku, is a personal favourite: ‘Hope everyone’s well. We are thinking about you all. Please come here to visit when you have time.’ The Amoy (a Min dialect) speaker asks whether the ‘friends of space’ have eaten yet. Radhekant Dave, speaking Gujarati a dialect of western India, sounds positively desperate with ‘Greetings from a human being of the Earth. Please contact.’ And Gunnel Almgren Schaar says in Swedish: ‘Greetings from a computer programmer in the little university town of Ithaca on the planet Earth.’4 They even managed some extinct languages, including Latin and ancient Sumerian.

  Pure chance had selected this band of ordinary souls from the Cornell campus for immortality. Many were studying students, others faculty members. Professor of Classics and comparative literature Frederick M. Ahl recorded the Greek, Latin and Welsh greetings. David I. Owen, professor of ancient Near Eastern and Judaic studies, voiced greetings in ancient Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, Hittite and Aramaic. Maria Nowakowska Stycos, the wife of another Cornell professor, was studying for her PhD and provided the Polish greeting. The Bengali speaker Subrata Mukherjee is now a professor in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at Cornell. The Rajasthani speaker Mool C. Gupta, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell, who said ‘we are happy here and you be happy there’, is now a professor at the University of Virginia. Swedish speaker Gunnel Almgren Schaar went on to become a professor in the computer science department at Grambling State University.

  Before the greetings tapes could be signed off for mixing and mastering, there was one more ingredient. They wanted a child’s voice on the record, to greet the cosmos on behalf of youngsters everywhere. For this final assignment, greetings team leader Linda simply went home, where she and Carl recorded the very sweet-sounding six-year-old Nick Sagan saying: ‘Hello from the children of planet Earth.’ Nick5 recalls being plopped down in front of a microphone, and being asked what he’d like to say, if he could say anything, to extraterrestrials. In The Farthest he recalls watching the VU meter needle as he spoke into the mic. In interviews he describes how all this didn’t seem too weird back then – his father was Carl Sagan, after all – but how today Voyager leaves him feeling wistful, that some tiny fragment of his childhood is preserved forever, a moment in time, moving further and further away.

  Many of the Voyager greetings veterans describe similar feelings – a gradual, dawning realisation that these tiny fleeting moments, memorable but transient, were now forever enshrined in these distant artefacts. Andrij says: ‘I feel very special to be part of this exclusive club of 55-plus speakers on the Golden Record. A relatively short life experience has put me in the history books, and in a relative sense, a trace of my being has been immortalised. The experience has also solidified my interest in astronomy and I feel part of the family of space travellers. And just as in 1977, I understand how important it was to represent Ukrainians at such a difficult time in their history.’

  Amahl adds: ‘It wasn’t until later that the enormity of it hit me in an emotional sense, after the work was done and there was finally time to sit and relax and contemplate. Today, I am 40 years older than I was then, and though I am the same person, I am not the same. And those years and life experiences have deepened my appreciation of the value of the work we all did to make this Golden Record. It was the gig of a lifetime and I am truly honoured and humbled by it all.’

  ***

  The picture team wanted to show human anatomy in detail. And they seemed to have found the very thing – a s
et of acetate overlays from the World Book Encyclopedia, each taking a section of the human anatomy. But there was a problem. While the eight illustrations were essentially perfect in all respects, showing human surface tissue, skeletal structure, circulatory system and musculature, they were covered with lots and lots of tiny black numbers. These tiny black numbers related to a key printed in the original book in which all the different parts of the body were named. However, this key wasn’t going with Voyager, and even if it had no one would be able to read it, so there was no point in these tiny black numbers. They served no purpose. Jon got in touch with the World Book team. It seemed there would be no problem providing a set of the original acetates, but they did not have any copies of the illustrations without the tiny black numbers. And so Linda set to work, spending hour upon painstaking hour, carefully painting over the numbers, matching the colours behind so that the numbers would be hidden.

  It seems appropriate that the woman whose drawing of a vulva was obliterated by NASA should now be tasked with covering up some unwanted black lines on their behalf. However, not only did it take her ages, it also didn’t work. Following hours of hard graft, the paint dried and flaked off. The black spots and numbers returned, and by now there was no time to do anything about them. Soon the images had to be whisked away for their final conversion to audio ahead of mastering. And so the anatomy sequence, though perfect in many respects, is sealed aboard with hundreds of tiny black dots and symbols whose meaning is likely to cause alien readers endless confusion.

  All the anatomy diagrams, which form the basis of images #18 to #25, were neuter. There was just a void where the sexual organs should be. By this point, Jon was a man possessed, a man completely immersed in the imagined headspace of an alien. There were more images to come that would tell the story of human reproduction but, the way Jon saw it, unless they added something here, the jigsaw would be missing a vital piece. So, to the asexual image #25 in the anatomy sequence, they added the male and female symbols that crop up elsewhere in the sequence (specifically image #32), and diagrams of the male and female reproductive organs.

  Finally, there was image #26, taken from Life: Cells, Organisms, Populations, a full-on sex-education-style cross-section diagram of both male and female reproductive organs. To this, again, the team added the female and male symbols, and a scale in centimetres. The anatomy sequence was ready. The images would take their place right after the DNA diagrams, and just before the pictures of egg, sperm and foetus.

  Now all they had to do was sneak all these genitals past NASA.

  ***

  On Friday 3 June 1977 Ann Druyan walked into the New York University Medical Center. She was there to record one of the final pieces for the sound essay: Ann’s EEG patterns. They already had a heartbeat, footsteps, laughter and speech, so why not go all the way and record thoughts and brainwaves – specifically the voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current within the neurons of Ann’s brain? The more ‘far out’ aspect to this plan was the thought that some advanced alien race might one day be able to interpret and even reconstruct her thoughts. Ann met Dr Julius Korein, and with Tim’s help they fixed an audiotape recorder to the medical data recorder, and Ann was left alone in a room to meditate for an hour.

  Recalling this experience years later, she described how these moments were the fulcrum around which her life revolved. It was two days after the phone call with Carl. Ann knew there were clouds gathering, but for now things had to carry on as normal. A scandal could be like a wrecking ball, derailing the project just as it seemed to be coming together. The Golden Record came first. And while the Nora Ephron party had been the start of her relationship with Carl Sagan, this hour in a New York medical centre, attached to an audiotape recorder, was a powerful moment of calm.

  Ann had prepared for the recording. She didn’t intend to just lie there and read a magazine. This was for a record going into space, so she had come along with a mental checklist of specific things and subjects she would think about – ideas, individuals, moments in history. Writing about it the following year, in Murmurs of Earth, she mentions how a couple of ‘irrepressible’ facts from her own life were also in her thoughts. Years later she would expand on this: she was in the full-blown throws of recently realised love.

  It’s about the most human situation there is. Most of us know what it’s like to yearn for a human being, to want to be alongside that human being for every waking moment. The difference is, of course, that when we experienced it we might have been trying to get to sleep in a dormitory in Sussex, or returning from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, or having just taken a promotion, or drinking coffees in a canteen, or having just danced drunkenly with someone at a party. Indeed, for many of us, these kinds of thoughts and epiphanies assault us right around the same time the hangover kicks in. For Ann, all these thoughts and emotions came over her while having her brainwaves measured by a machine ahead of having the audio put on two metal records that would drift in space for a billion years. The Voyager Golden Records have the sound of brainwaves from a human being falling in love with another human being, but not yet with that human being.

  Eventually, when it came to the final ‘Sounds of Earth’ mix,6 the hour of recorded thought impulses would be compressed into about a minute. Sped up to such a degree, it sounds like crackling static, or firecrackers. Ann said in a radio interview: ‘I was thinking in this meditation about the wonder of love, and of being in love … Now, whenever I’m down, I’m thinking, still they move, 35,000 miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great wide-open sea of interstellar space.’

  Notes

  1 See Carl Sagan: A Life, Davidson, pp.302–3.

  2 ‘As you probably know,’ he said, ‘my country is situated on the west coast of the continent of Africa …’

  3 Linda would also write the explanatory chapter, ‘A Voyager’s Greetings’ within Murmurs of Earth.

  4 You can listen to the greetings via NASA’s Soundcloud page: soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/golden-record-greetings-to-the.

  5 Today Nick is a writer. He wrote the Idlewild series of novels, episodes of Star Trek, produced a two-part Alien Encounters TV special with SETI, and helped promote the recent Cosmos reboot.

  6 Ann Druyan’s brainwaves form the penultimate piece of the sound essay. The final segment is a recording of a pulsar made by Frank and Amahl, specifically the warbling radio signal projected by the spinning star CP1133.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mixing and Mastering

  ‘Any record to go through a studio of the level of Columbia Records New York City in the 1970s is going to sound good. Those were the best engineers in the world.’

  Tim Ferris

  The business end of the Voyager Golden Record project came to its hectic conclusion in New York City. The picture team were still working feverishly in Ithaca, as Tim and Ann descended on CBS Columbia at 49 East 52nd Street, Manhattan. This was to be their home for the best part of two weeks as they oversaw the mixing, mastering, sequencing, clearing and cutting. Tim says: ‘I really had to work pretty long hours to make sure we got it done on schedule because there were an awful lot of moving parts.’ Those moving parts included all the sequencing and mixing of the sound essay, the greetings, the music and, let’s not forget, the audio-converted pictures that hadn’t even been delivered yet.

  For the sound essay alone, Tim and Ann had returned to New York with around 50 sounds. They had armfuls of recordings in all sorts of formats, supplied on studio master tapes, on quarter-inch reels, and on original LPs. There was borrowed vinyl from Alan Lomax, shop-bought LPs, tapes from archives, yet more recordings from the Library of Congress. They had tapes of UN recordings and whale sounds, and a further selection of Cornell greetings was en route. Thanks to Mickey Kapp putting the Electra Sound Archives at their disposal (and even hand-delivering some individual tracks), they had material on tap for the sound essay, but they still had to sequence and mix the thing – which was no easy task – and th
ey were still missing a few vital ingredients.

  For all technical wizardry, CBS put Russ Payne in charge. Russ was, by all accounts, a brilliant recording engineer. By 1977 he was one of the old guard, an experienced hand who favoured sharp suits, thin ties and a neat side parting. He had a narrow, angular face, a bullet dimple on his chin, two sets of laughter lines and fine crow’s feet beneath intense eyes. He would helm the project and was present throughout the entire mixing and mastering process. Writing about Russ the following year, Ann describes him warmly as a calm, cowboy-accented character who would eat fruit and smoke cigarettes. And when it came to the essay at least, most of the engineering was carried out by Russ and Tim working behind the industry-standard hardware of a 16-track Ampex.

  There were plenty of other CBS bods who would lend a hand. One of them was a Brooklyn sound guy named Jimmy Iovine. Tim had been in touch with John Lennon about the project back when The Beatles were still in the running. While their music was not destined to make the final cut, Lennon would still impact the record by recommending they use his engineer, Jimmy. Jimmy was still near the start of his career, but he had already worked with Lennon1 and on Springsteen’s Born to Run. He’d also contributed to Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell, due for launch around the same time as the Voyagers. Alongside a pretty jaw-dropping roll call of hit albums, Jimmy would work in the music departments of a couple of good John Hughes films in the 1980s (Sixteen Candles, Weird Science), start Interscope Records in the 1990s (Eminem, U2), and found Beats Electronics with Dr Dre in the 2000s (um, headphones). For now he was an engineer. Tim told me: ‘Jimmy was there for inspiration and ideas; he helped us physically mix the Sounds sequence. When not needed, he hung out at Bruce Springsteen’s recording session down the hall, which was fine with me as I knew he was building a career and could use the contacts.’