BURIED TREASURE
To Infinity
Intercepted on eternal astral flight, computer-music balms for inner voyaging.
The woman whose head expanded: Laurie Spiegel explores outer and inner universes, Bell Labs, 1978.
Emmanuel Ghent
Laurie Spiegel
The Expanding Universe
PHILO, 1980
LAUNCHED IN 1977, NASA’s two Voyager probes are now billions of miles from Earth. On board both is a gold-plated 16 rpm 12-inch album featuring a selection of music, sounds and images for any alien civilisation which may one day encoun-ter it. On the ‘Sounds Of Earth’ portion is a short excerpt from Laurie Spiegel’s electronic “sonification” of Johannes Kepler’s 1619 astronomical work Harmonices Mundi, which saw planetary motion in musical terms.
“It was a privilege, an honour to be chosen to have work on board,” Spiegel tells MOJO today. Yet when asked if this situation has strange effects on her psyche, she says, “life here on Earth, with what we humans are doing to the planet, other species and to each other – just living does much stranger things to my mind than the thought of that literally stellar accomplishment.”