Musicologists in Space

Is musicology limited to human culture? The NASA team that put together the Voyager mission forty years ago didn’t think so. They included on board of their two spacecraft a “Golden Record” that included greetings in more than fifty languages, samples of music from various cultures across the world, as well as a range of environmental sounds. A gramophone player (cartridge and stylus) that would allow for these sounds to come to life was included in the spacecraft, as well as carefully crafted, non-verbal instructions on how to use this device.

The Golden Record was put together in only six weeks. Given the relative difficulty of acquiring recordings of non-western music at the time, this is a remarkable achievement. Much of what is now leaving the solar system, which can safely be described as a reified canon of world music, is as much the result of careful planning as of what was available at short notice.¹ The collection includes a wide range of musical traditions, from Australian Aboriginal songs to Mexican mariachi music, from Georgian choral singing to Senegalese percussion, from Chinese guqin to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. (A persistent rumor has it that the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” was not included because of copyright issues.)

The Golden Record has attracted much attention. It is not easy to explain exactly what the researchers were hoping for when they included it in the mission. As critics were quick to point out, the Golden Record makes certain assumptions about the kinds of extraterrestrials—above all, that they have ears, or some kind of auditory apparatus, to perceive the sounds of earth. In the end, the researchers agreed that the Golden Record has largely metaphoric value; it is best described as a “message in a bottle”—or even a “mixtape for outer space”—that may or may not find a sympathetic recipient at the other end in outer space. As if to underline the symbolic nature of the recording, the line “To the makers of music—all worlds, all times” is etched into the center of the record, in breach of the rules against verbal explanation.

But let’s assume for a moment there is more to this message than just a playful, and somewhat sentimental stocktaking of human musical culture. Let’s take the boundless optimism that carried the entire Voyager mission somewhat more seriously. Especially in light of the discoveries of more and more exoplanetary systems in the last few years, and the growing confidence that life must be out there, somewhere, we can turn seriously to the question of what would happen if another carbon-based (or maybe, just maybe, silicon-based) life forms. What would happen if extraterrestrials at the other end found the Golden Record and succeeded in playing it?

There is every reason to believe that music plays such an important role precisely because of its communicative power beyond the world of words. The term universal language was carefully avoided in this context, but the idea that music might allow for a form of communication across planetary systems, and perhaps across species, is strongly present.

This is where musicology enters the post-human age. How can we even begin to imagine what the listening experience of extraterrestrials is like? Despite Steve Martin’s quip that an extraterrestrial message had been decoded as “Send more Chuck Berry!,” we will likely not have a definite answer for quite some time. But that doesn’t mean that we have to wait with bated breath until we receive signals from outer space. As philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith has recently counseled, if we try to understand how alternative lifeforms on other planets operate, we can do worse than to begin by studying the radically different organizations of other species found on earth, starting with the octopus and its enigmatic non-somatotopic nervous system.

Musicology, similarly, can begin imagining forms of extraterrestrial hearing by starting with the constraints of non-human auditory apparatus. To remain with octopodes for the moment, their hearing seems to be limited to a much-reduced range, between 400 and 1,000 Hz. That suggests that low instruments—essentially the entire range below middle C on the piano—is inaudible to the octopus, and any timbre rich in overtones will only be transmitted as a relatively simple spectrum that is limited to, at best, the first few upper partials. But this may also have other consequences: humans, for instance, perceive the infrasound range, that is, the range below the auditory threshold, at 20 Hz, as pulsations. Is that the case for the octopus as well? Does that mean that the rate of individual events that the octopus can perceive per second is higher than for humans? This seems fairly likely. Even though research on this particular question has not been conducted, many species, such as birds, have a higher rate of perception than humans. If a pigeon watches a movie made for humans, it would appear slow and jittery, since the rate of 24 images per seconds at which movies operate to simulate smooth motion is below the perceptual threshold of birds. Their flicker-fusion threshold is at 90 to 100 images per second. To answer this question, to enter into post-human musicology, we would need to rethink the very parameters of what makes music—or rather, the dimensions in which we (and others) listen to music. In post-human musicology, the very act of listening is a creaturely activity. Interestingly, even though the occasion that motivates this question here is new, there are numerous approaches that thinkers have offered throughout history, though sometimes we have to scratch the surface somewhat to get to an answer, however preliminary.

In this context, creative fringe thinkers such as Friedrich Wilhelm Opelt, who tried to reinvent musical listening from the ground up in the early nineteenth century, starting with the mechanical siren, move center stage. Put simply, Opelt saw that pitches and rhythms both operate in the temporal dimension, though in a different frequency range. The difference was demarcated by the auditory threshold, which separated stimuli below 20 Hz into rhythms, and those above 20 Hz into pitches. Opelt’s eccentric music theory sought to exploit this correlation.

It was left to a biologist, Karl Ernst von Baer, addressing the Russian Society of Entomology in 1860, to describe the effects of creaturely perception. For an insect with a lifespan of twenty-eight days, that is, one thousandth of the average lifespan of a human, the world presents itself very differently. Since they don’t live for more than one lunar cycle, the waxing and waning of the moon will not combine into a repeating pattern. Seasonal changes are far beyond the insect observer’s horizons, and sunrises and sunsets will become rare and meaningful events. If we assume, with von Baer, that the metabolic rate of our imaginary insect is a thousand times faster, implying that the number of individual perceptions made over the lifespan will correspond to those of one human life, then this thought experiment even affects our auditory perception. A frequency of 20,000 Hz at the very top end of the auditory range would be heard at a mere 20 Hz, which means that it is barely perceptible as a pitch.

Opelt and von Baer, plus a whole range of other thinkers who no doubt still remain to be rediscovered, expand and relativize our idea of what listening might mean. We need to reduce the idea of music to its most basic components—to bare vibrations—and to build it up again from there. This radical stripping of what music might mean may allow us a radically different approach to a phenomenon that may easily seem all too familiar.

Who knows whether Edda Moser’s “Queen of the Night,” included in the Golden Record, might sound like a basso profundo to an extraterrestrial? Perhaps the Peruvian Wedding Song, which lasts about half a minute on the recording, will exceed the natural lifespan of our listening extraterrestrials and punctuate their lives from birth to death as a curious rhythm? Or perhaps there are undetected structural similarities between Japanese shakuhachi music and the Night Chant of the Navajo that only become perceptible when heard through alien ears?

By grappling with music at its most fundamental level and trying to understand what it means to listen in its various manifestations—in short: by shaking up our fundamental assumptions about music—we explore the communicative potential of music and can gain a new angle on its workings. In other words, even as we turn our attention to distant planets, the benefits we may reap from this post-human musicology are ultimately geocentric and distinctly human.

1. The greetings in various languages have a similarly improvised quality. The native speakers were simply asked how they would greet beings from other planets. Perhaps the most charming greeting is in the Amoy dialect (spoken in the Fujian province in Southeastern China): “Thài-khong pêng-iú, lín-hó. Lín chia̍h-pá–bē? Ū-êng, to̍h lâi gún chia chē–ô͘!,” which translates as: “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time!”