The Vinyl Frontier
Page 18
There were plenty of sounds that still hadn’t been found. They wanted to include, for example, a kiss. This was again one of those sound effects that you’d think would be easy to find but had proved tricky. The problem was they wanted to record something genuine – but not too ‘smacky’. In Murmurs Ann describes how Jimmy, in the studio that day, offered his forearm – he was sure he could create a believable kiss by sucking it. But Ann wanted something real. In the end, the sound on the record is Tim kissing Ann on the cheek.2
Tim worked more or less full time at the studio. When working on the Ozma Records reissue in 2016, he described how the ‘Sounds of Earth’ required several people simultaneously to have their hands on the mixing-board sliders as he conducted. Ann was there a lot of the time too but was also still making frequent field trips to track down missing pieces of the jigsaw – the aforementioned Indian raga hunt, for example. Carl would also pop by from time to time, to charm the CBS team and listen to how things were progressing.
***
When I was young, my father attempted to explain to me how satellites worked. He had a piece of paper and a pen. He drew a picture of the Earth, a large circle, with a stick boy standing on top. Then, like a million science teachers before him, he asked me to imagine throwing a ball. A line indicated the path of the ball. The first throw went a short way along before curving down towards the circle of Earth’s crust. Then he asked me to imagine throwing it harder. The second throw went further, coming to rest a little further around the circle. The third went further still, resisting gravity horizontally, before falling back to earth. Now he asked me to imagine throwing it even harder, so hard that it never reached the surface but kept on falling round and round in orbit.
The picture team, like the record team, were now working towards finalising and recording the pictures. This needed to be done ASAP, as they knew that Tim was by now pulling things together at CBS in New York and so he needed that tape. But they wanted to make sure there was a picture of a book. It seemed an important human trait to attempt to communicate – that we write, record and share information in these printed book thingies.
Jon Lomberg visited Donald Eddy, the curator of rare books at the Cornell University Library. Here there were all sorts of scarce and valuable volumes, including a Shakespeare first folio, but Jon was interested in a particular book suggested by Philip Morrison. Specifically he wanted the 1728 English edition of the third volume in Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and it was the diagram on page six of book three, De mundi systemate (On the System of the World), that most interested him. Just like the picture my father drew for me when I was young, the diagram in question shows Earth with an imagined cannonball being fired, faster and harder, until it achieves escape velocity. Jon says: ‘Philip Morrison suggested the page because it was the first time in history that we had shown how you could launch something in orbit.’
As usual, Jon wanted to cram in as much information as he could. So this photograph, one of the very last to appear, doesn’t just show the page in the book, it shows a finger and thumb, pulling back the corner of the right-hand page, as if about to be turned, revealing the mechanics of printed books. He says: ‘I have a particular fondness for that image for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it is my thumb in the picture. I wish I’d cleaned my fingernails!’ The picture sequence really was going out on a high.
Amahl was kind enough to share with me some pictures, showing their workroom at Cornell from these final stages of the project. There’s Amahl leaning over some slides. There’s a camera. There’s the desk covered in coffee-table books with bookmarks and notes. There’s the projector. There’s a video camera, filming another also-ran version of the licking, biting, drinking photograph, and there’s that same photograph being televised on a small black-and-white screen.
The fact that the images and sound hadn’t been made to work more closely together, so that sound could correspond with each photograph, was a lasting regret. Frank voiced this regret in his ‘Foundations of the Voyager Record’ essay in 1978, and voiced it again to me on the telephone 40 years later. But while this was no time for perfectionism, even as the image sequence drew to a close, there was one final chance to realise this thwarted ambition.
The pictures had been arranged broadly chronologically, just like the sound essay, telling an evolutionary story that climaxed with humankind’s ultimate technological leap – to escape our atmosphere and journey into space – with two NASA pictures in the form of an astronaut in space, and another showing the 1975 Titan Centaur Launch at Cape Canaveral. But how should the picture sequence end? Jon’s thoughts went to the alien audience and concluded that the images should end by teeing up the music that was to follow on the Golden Record.
‘It seemed to me that if I put myself in the role of extraterrestrial, which is what I viewed my job description as being, then the music might be some of the most mysterious parts of the whole record … You know a sound of thunder? Well, that’s easy to recognise, there’ll be thunder on other planets. Same with rain and surf. Sounds made by air passing over soft tissue … those kind of sounds, they’re possible to interpret. But what is music – to an alien? Is it earthling speech? Is it the call of an animal? What is it? So I thought there needed to be some explicit way of trying to explain what music is. That is the only example where we did that and that was my idea. Well, we have these sequences of Earth, how do we end it? What’s the final picture? And I thought, “well, what comes right after the pictures – the music…”’
The final two images in the picture sequence are ‘String Quartet’ (#115) and ‘Score of Quartet and Violin’ (#116). The quartet in question is in fact the Quartetto Italiano, founded in 1945 by Paolo Borciani (1st violin), Elisa Pegreffi (2nd violin), Lionello Forzanti (viola, replaced in 1947 by Piero Farulli) and Franco Rossi (cello). Although this quartet did record a version of the final piece of the Voyager playlist – the Cavatina from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 – it was not the Quartetto Italiano’s recording that made the Voyager record. However, the photograph of them served other purposes. It pleased Jon because it clearly showed a number of human figures playing similarly shaped stringed instruments of different sizes – violin, viola and cello. It showed the mechanics of playing notes, of bows being drawn over strings. It also showed that the making of music was often a social activity – that groups of human beings came together to create music.
‘One of the sounds that should be easy to decipher is the vibration of a string. That will be a universal. A string being plucked or bowed on any planet in the universe will make the same overtone series. Doesn’t matter what the atmosphere is, it doesn’t matter what gravity is, it doesn’t matter what the sun is, the overtone series of a vibrating string is going to be the same.’
The final image (#116) is a combined one: a lone violin on its side against a black background, directly above a page of musical notation from the Cavatina from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13. Immediately after this last image is encoded on the record are a few seconds of the sound of that piece of music. So the aliens will receive a picture of humans playing instruments, the instrument itself, some musical notation, and a few seconds of those instruments playing that piece of music, all in a direct sequence.
***
Thanks to delegation, Carl had been able to keep up with his day job during these busy days in May. By now, however, he was focusing solely on the Golden Record, and it was time for him to earn his crust. It was all rather worrying. All this time, all this work, and everyone knew that NASA could can the whole thing and there would be nothing the team could do about it. It was now early June. The mixing of the greetings, the music and the sound essay was coming together at CBS.
In Murmurs there’s a description of NASA officials actually visiting CBS Records itself to check the contents. Carl was there. You might expect high emotion, confusion or angry rejections. This was art rubbing up against scienc
e, bureaucracy rubbing up against creativity. It seemed to Carl, anyway, that they were only interested in ticking some boxes, making sure nothing too racy or potentially embarrassing was trying to sneak aboard. Carl describes the officials’ muted responses – from recognition of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ to ‘bland approval’. Indeed the only fallout came the next day, when Carl received an agitated NASA call from some administrator who was concerned there wasn’t an Irish tune on the record. Carl pointed out there was no Italian opera or Jewish folk music either.
However, Tim doesn’t remember it quite like this. He remembers Carl having one critical meeting, in Washington DC, after which he remembers Carl reporting that they weren’t really interested in hearing the music at all – they were much more concerned with the images. Certainly this Washington DC meeting took place. And, for another perspective, we can revisit Jon’s manuscript. Let’s imagine him and Frank like a pair of nervous uncles pacing a hospital ward, waiting for news of a birth.
‘After we had selected all the images for the picture sequence and record cover, Carl took everything to Washington for a review by NASA Headquarters,’ he writes. ‘Frank and I waited nervously back in the Space Science Building at Cornell. Carl had promised to phone us from the meeting to tell us if NASA had any problems with the picture sequence. Frank and I were both at the thin edge of exhaustion, too many keyed up days and sleepless nights.’
When Carl did finally call, Frank put him on speakerphone. Carl was apparently surrounded by NASA bureaucrats and lawyers. Jon writes: ‘He sounded as nervous and tense as I ever heard him, though he was trying to mask it.’
‘Hi, Carl,’ said Frank. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Well…’ said Carl, ‘they like almost everything. The only picture they have a problem with is the nudes.3 We must remove them, or cover up the genitals.’
Jon immediately flared up.
‘That would defeat the whole reason for including it!’ he fumed. ‘And dropping it will reduce the clarity of the whole reproduction sequence.’
Frank silenced Jon with a gesture.
‘Anything else?’ he asked calmly.
‘Well, they think the man looks too much like a surfer. Can we make his hair less wavy?’
This was too much for Jon who sat down in disgust.
‘Is that all?’ Frank asked again.
‘Yes,’ said Carl. ‘Otherwise everything is okay.’
And the phone call ended there.
Jon writes: ‘I was not pleased. Strung out as I was, I had no tolerance for NASA’s caution.’
Meanwhile, Frank was positively beaming.
‘Don’t you get it? They approved our message. It’s going.’
They walked back to their workroom. They removed the photograph of the nude pregnant couple from the sequence of slides spread out on the light table. Frank picked up the corresponding silhouette slide, with the figures shown in black outline, the foetus visible in the woman’s stomach.
‘How can we change it?’
There was now only an hour or two left until the sequences had to go to Colorado for recording. There was no time to create and photograph another silhouette. Frank said they would have to change it directly on the slide. Frank handed Jon a fine-point black marker and a scalpel saying ‘Just do your best.’
At first Jon was too angry. He refused, pouting: ‘It’s bullshit what they want,’ he said. ‘And I can’t do it with these tools.’
Frank sighed, picked up a magnifier and began to go about trying to retouch the slide himself. Jon relented, took the pen, the knife and the magnifier and sat down to ‘scratch and dot the man’s face into ethnic neutrality’.
A few months later Jon received a letter from a NASA lawyer explaining their decision and countering his contention that they had chosen a photo that was explicitly unerotic. ‘Some people find naked pregnant women extremely erotic,’ it read. ‘
I would suppose this to be among the most unusual phrases ever to appear in official NASA correspondence.
‘In the next two decades I saw both how bureaucratic NASA was and also how bureaucratic they had to be,’ Jon writes. ‘Given the craziness that passes for sanity in Washington, and seeing various tempests over art funding, exhibits at NASA, and the indiscretions of politicians, I guess it was too much to expect NASA to take the long view of interstellar messages. The only audience NASA could afford to care about was the audience on Capitol Hill.’
Given NASA’s timidity about nude humans, it does seem surprising that they did not also seek to eliminate or at least paper over parts of the anatomy sequence, or the naked bottom in image #62, or the picture of the nursing mother. Perhaps she got by without comment because the nipple was not exposed. Thomas J. Prendergast, picture librarian at the United Nations, also wrote to Jon after launch: ‘You may be interested to know that the appearance of the photograph of the nursing mother in Malaysia accompanying some newspaper stories about Voyager, prompted over a thousand requests for copies of that picture. Most of them came from members of La Leche League, which promotes breast feeding…’
Carl visited Tim in New York later that evening. Tim says ‘I remember he flew down from Ithaca to Washington. The flight was diverted by bad weather to, like, Baltimore. They took a train or something, got to NASA, had the meeting. Got on a plane. That one was diverted too, also to Baltimore again … By the time he got to my place it was 11 o’clock at night, he was literally in tears. But he was cheered that, so far as the music goes, they just don’t care. They didn’t even really want to hear it. All they cared about was the nude photo. I think he kind of bulkheaded off NASA from our team and that was probably a good idea. We didn’t see them they didn’t see us till after it was done. And I think that was a smart way to do it.’
***
With the last pieces in place – the Newton diagram, spacewalk, rocket launch, sunset, string quartet and Cavatina score – and the entire sequence cleared by NASA, it was time to convert the slides to audio.
Val had found Colorado Video, that firm based in Boulder, Colorado, who could help them with this never-before-needed tech. The firm offered its equipment, expertise, personnel and time entirely as a public service. Frank describes in Murmurs how the president, Glen Southworth, personally assisted into the ‘wee hours’ recording the pictures. Technicians and engineers spent hours operating the equipment, making adjustments, tweaking dials and knobs to optimise quality. They would also give up time so the nervous picture team could have a complete trial run prior to the final recording session. Not only that, but staff at Colorado Video helped negotiate the loan of a Honeywell 5600C recorder – Honeywell Inc was based nearby in Denver. This was a portable 14-track reel-to-reel tape recorder that, in terms of fidelity, was the best machine for this odd job. It was advertised as ‘portable’ but it still had some serious heft. It was light blue in colour, about the size of a large, fatter-than-usual briefcase.
Unlike that working set-up at Cornell, the Colorado technicians did not project the photographic slides onto a piece of paper taped to the wall. The images were brought to and scanned at Colorado Video using a Dage Video Camera and the all-important 321 Analyzer, the output of the 321 feeding to the Honeywell recorder.
Judd Johnson, who was 33 at the time, was the fourth employee at Colorado Video. The company built all kinds of specialised video processing equipment for various applications, including some designed for astronomer Dick Dunn at the National Solar Observatory at Sunspot New Mexico. When Judd joined in 1970 the firm was located in 250 Pearl Street, West Boulder. ‘Everything was low budget,’ he says. ‘We had built our own workbenches, wired the place, cleaned up after ourselves.’ It sounds like it was a fun, ad hoc sort of place to work, with everyone mucking in, helping out on different tasks and types of work. During downtime, they created an indoor archery range. ‘Because we were shooting down the aisles between the workbenches,’ says Judd, ‘we could only practise after hours or while everyone was on lunch break.’
It was this Analyzer that enabled the conversion from video to audio. Another employee, Wyndham Hannaway, carried out the actual encoding. He was 27 at the time, working as an entry-level technician, which involved hand-wiring, troubleshooting, manufacturing products, presenting at trade shows, travelling to clients and some special projects. Wyndham didn’t have any first-hand contact with the Voyager picture team – all of that was handled by Glen – but he does remember the work. Indeed, he and Judd are the only two Voyager veterans from the firm who are still alive.
The Golden Record encoding was carried out on a project bench that Wyndham hand-rigged in a darkened area of the building. The slides were placed on a light box, a black cardboard mask was made to cover the light box apart from a cut-out to hold the slide. A vertical copy stand held the standard-definition silicon-target vidicon tube camera built by Dage, which had a Nikon 55mm macro lens attached. A Kodak filter holder was also attached to the lens so that Wyndham could manually swap the red, green and blue filters for the three-colour exposures. Each video frame was ‘frozen’ in a disc-based video framestore, then the Honeywell was run for a minute to capture the slow-scan signal.
Through the various road tests of the system, the final black-and-white images took up around six to eight seconds of audio – much less time than Frank had guessed back in Honolulu.
Wyndham says: ‘The one-inch tape from the Honeywell DC recorder was shipped to the Voyager team, and I drove the recorder back to south Denver to the Honeywell plant where we had borrowed it.’ Phew!