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GG on Voyager
On Sun, 15 Feb 1998, Jörgen Lundmark wrote:
(...)
> superhuman precision of his playing. The film concludes with reference
> to Gould's much publicized (and quite genuine) admiration for Petula
> Clark and to the NASA Voyager disc with its recordings of whales and
> Bach (by Gould) for possible interstellar consumption."
As for the Voyager disc, I recently visited the commemorative display of
this (at the Smithsonian in Washington DC) and stood for a long time
looking at the replicas of the disc and the metal plate that are supposed
to communicate some basic information about humanity and the earth. The
exhibit has a ten-minute video about Voyager running at all times, and the
video's sound effects seemed to be a simulation of the disc's contents
(more than 90 minutes of greetings in different languages, animal sounds,
music, etc.)...but I listened through two complete cycles of the video,
and no GG.
Anyone here know if *any* of the disc's sounds are reused in the video, or
is it a more recent soundtrack? As I recall it now, the performance of
Beethoven's fifth didn't sound so much like Klemperer, but might have
been, and the Brandenburg excerpt did sound like Richter's style.
That exhibit also doesn't list the contents of the disc. It seems that
would be a useful thing to display. (Yes, they're available elsewhere,
but it could be right there in the display case without much work.)
http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/record.html
Have any of you seen the CD-ROM which this site says was issued as a copy
of the Voyager record?
Bradley Lehman ~ Harrisonburg VA, USA ~ 38.44N+78.87W
bpl@umich.edu ~ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/