In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space, and it remains the only human-made object to have left the solar system. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth (Zone Books, 2021) ask big ... Show More
Nov 8
Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC with Allie Martin (Oxford UP, 2025)
Gentrification is often considered through a visual lens, where development, progress, and neighborhood changes are observed. But what does gentrification sound like?In Intersectional Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC, (Oxford UP, 2025), author Alli ... Show More
47m 7s
Nov 3
Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counterhistory with Ronald Radano (Duke UP, 2025)
From the inside flap:In Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counterhistory (Duke UP, 2025), Ronald Radano proposes a new understanding of US Black music by focusing on the key matter of value, manifested musically in its seemingly embodied qualities—spirit, soul, and groove. While ... Show More
1 h
Mar 2024
The Recent Glitch Threatening Voyager 1
The Voyager 1 space probe is the farthest human-made object in space. It launched in 1977 with a golden record on board that carried assorted sounds of our home planet: greetings in many different languages, dogs barking, and the sound of two people kissing, to name but a few exa ... Show More
12m 25s
Apr 2020
How the Voyager Golden Records Work
<p>As part of a super 70s push to get Earth to a seat at the table of the Galactic Federation (in case there is, in fact, such a thing), astronomer Carl Sagan oversaw an ambitious project to launch a compilation of Earth’s greatest hits into deep space.</p><p> </p> Learn more abo ... Show More
1h 3m