Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” has one of the strangest places in music history: NASA sent it into space. Alongside music by Bach and Beethoven, it became part of a message designed for an audience that might never exist.
In 1977, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched carrying a copy each of the Golden Record, a collection of sounds and images intended to introduce Earth to any extraterrestrial civilisation that might eventually find the spacecraft. Music became part of humanity’s attempt to explain itself across an unimaginable distance.
The contents were selected by a committee chaired by astronomer Carl Sagan. The musical portion runs for approximately 90 minutes. Think about the difficulty of that assignment: choose enough music to suggest what one planet sounds like, knowing that every inclusion leaves countless traditions and performers unheard.
NASA’s official track list contains 27 musical selections. It opens with the first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 and includes Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria and the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” sits among those selections as a representative of rock and roll.
The list also includes Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven performing “Melancholy Blues,” Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night,” Georgian choral singing and Javanese gamelan. Bulgarian singer Valya Balkanska appears with “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin,” while the Indian selection features Kesar Bai Kerkar singing “Jaat Kahan Ho.”
One way to hear that sequence is as an invitation to abandon the idea that one musical tradition can explain everyone. A listener moving through it encounters different voices, instruments and ways of organising sound. Even familiar recordings take on a strange new role when you imagine them being used to introduce an entire species.
Music shared the record with spoken greetings in 55 languages, 115 encoded images and sounds including surf, thunder, birds and whales. That surrounding material gives the project another dimension. An imagined recipient would encounter music alongside traces of the environments in which human beings live.
The object itself was carefully made. Each disc measures 12 inches across and consists of gold-plated copper. NASA’s manufacturing history describes a chain involving record makers in France and the United States, from cutting the lacquer masters to plating the finished discs. Making this unusual cultural message required the practical work of producing a playable record.
Each record travelled inside a protective aluminium jacket, accompanied by a cartridge and needle. Symbolic instructions explain how to play it, and the intended playback speed is 16⅔ revolutions per minute. The cover also provides information intended to help a finder locate Earth and establish how long the record has travelled.
The music therefore travelled as information on a physical object attached to a spacecraft. Any eventual listener would first have to find a probe and work out how to recover its contents. The imagined encounter is extraordinary before the first musical note even enters the story.
It is tempting to assume that a beautiful melody would explain itself to any intelligence. The Golden Record cannot establish that. We can imagine another civilisation recognising patterns or repetition, but understanding what a performance means to the people who made it is a much larger leap. That uncertainty is part of the project’s fascination.
The selection also leaves a question for listeners here on Earth. How would you represent music if you had only 90 minutes? Would you choose your favourites, the recordings you consider historically important, or the greatest variety of musical experiences you could fit? Each approach would produce a different portrait of humanity.
You can explore NASA’s complete music list and try the experiment yourself. Pick something you already know, then follow it with a selection you have never heard. Consider what each performance communicates before you look up its history, and what becomes clearer once you learn where it came from.
An inscription etched into the records offers a fitting dedication: “To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.” It gives this collection an audience wider than anyone could promise to reach.
Which recording would you send if it might become someone’s first encounter with music from Earth?