It’s Time For A Musical World Record Wednesday! The “Golden Record,” Created By NASA And Placed

It’s time for a musical World Record Wednesday! The “Golden Record,” created by NASA and placed on both Voyager spacecraft in 1977, is the phonographic recording to travel farthest. Currently hurtling through space at a distance of over 12 billion miles from Earth on Voyager I, the album is literally a “world record"—a collection of sounds, songs, and short speeches intended to represent the best of planet Earth and humanity. The tracks were carefully curated by NASA and a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, and include music from Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and others. (Fun fact: the producer of the Golden Record,“ Timothy Ferris, is an award-winning science author who wrote the script for the Museum’s Space Show “Dark Universe.”)

The Record also features musical recordings from Senegal, Russia, Japan, and other countries. Carl Sagan, who worked on the project, stated that "the spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic 'ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Listen to the album on the Museum’s first-ever Spotify playlist: https://goo.gl/mogYK6

Image: NASA