"Cooper set about making a record that would have the best chance of making sense to an alien." Guardian
I wondered what our music might sound like to an alien, and made a piece based on the idea. It’s part of a project by Artangel celebrating 50 years since the voyager probe went out into space with its golden record.
Thanks to Artangels for the invitation to be part of their Earth Rising project (and many thanks to Tim Jonze for the great chats at the Guardian and the feature)
In the 1970s, the Golden Record was sent into space to introduce humanity to extraterrestrial life.
Half a century later, Artangel presents Earth Rising: A new concept album introducing humanity to itself.
The idea is that if we’re sending music into space to be heard by someone or something in many eons, we have no reasonable grounds to assume their biology will be the same as ours, so how “music” is heard is likely to be very different.
That idea is first demonstrated by showing how single sounds made from my body, form tones when we play them too fast for our human perceptual apparatus to delineate the individual hits.
But for an alien, it’s likely they will transition from individual sounds to something akin to tones at a different point, or they may hear all of the content as individual sounds, which is the theme I explore. So, once we have heard how single clicks form tones, we then hear how our human experience of harmony is built from multiple sounds playing at different rates - harmony is super-perceptual polyrhythm, that is, rhythms too fast for us to hear as individual percussive sounds, but which we can appreciate via the ratios of those percussive sounds in an emotive manner, forming our human representation of music.
"Cooper’s track is embellished with huge 1980s synth chords that give it a brilliantly retro sci-fi feel, a concession to the fact that it’s currently only going to be heard by humans." Guardian
