Are aliens listening to PNG music?
If there is life in outer space, it’s possible that a life form is listening to music from Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. They’re listening thanks to a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, put on board the Voyager spacecrafts.
There are two Voyager spacecrafts, both launched within months of each other in 1977.
Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in August 2012, while Voyager 2 reached
interstellar space last December, after taking a different route.
NASA says interstellar space is where our sun’s constant flow of material and magnetic field stops affecting its surroundings – about 18,450,000,000 kilometres from Earth.
The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by the late Carl Sagan of Cornell University, who compiled 115 images and sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales and other animals.
“It was our chance to create a human culture chest of Noah,” Sagan said at the time. Two of the 27 songs are from the Pacific. NASA lists the PNG music as a ‘men’s house song’ from the Nyaura clan in Kandingei village, in Sepik Province. It was recorded by Robert MacLennan in 1964.
NASA lists the Solomon Islands’ contribution as panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service from the village of Oroha, in Malaita Province.
There were eight men playing the pipes for the recording. Sam Matanai, the nephew of original musician Isaac Houmawai, says the song is traditionally reserved for special occasions, like feasts.
Both spacecraft are hurtling through space at about 55,000kph, and aren’t expected to come close to another star for at least another 40,000 years. ■
– KEVIN McQUILLAN