Presenter: Good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to our daily programme “Reaching Beyond”. 
Tonight’s talk is the first of a series of three entitled “The Sounds of Earth”. Narrating is Mr. James Shawnessey.
Mr. James Shawnessey: “How could you make an alien understand what it is like to be a human being on the planet earth?” 
This was the question posed to a committee of experts in 1977 before the launching of Voyager 1 and 2. 
The two American spacecraft were going to carry messages of greeting to any intelligent life form they might meet.  
To many people’s surprise, experts decided that one of the best ways to communicate with an alien would be with music. 
So, they devoted 87 minutes of the Voyager video message discs to a selection of “the earth’s greatest hits”. 
Why choose music? Firstly, because the structure of music is based on numbers and musical harmony is easily analysed in mathematical terms. 
The scientists argued that as mathematics is the most universal of languages, aliens were more likely to understand the mathematical structure of our music than anything else about us. 
But the experts also felt that music expressed human feelings better than anything else and could represent the variety of human cultures best. 
There has never been a society without its own distinctive music to express its sadness and pain, its happiness and tranquillity. 
The committee chose among other pieces, Aborigine songs from Australia, the Navaho Indians’ Night Chant and panpipes from Peru. 
They added Javanese music, bagpipes from Azerbaijan, a raga from India, bamboo flutes from Japan and percussion from Senegal. 
There were songs from Georgia, Zaire, Mexico, New Guinea and Bulgaria. 
There was also the jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong performing Melancholy Blues and rock’n’roller Chuck Berry singing Johnny B. Goode. 
From the western classical tradition, they chose Renaissance music, three examples of Bach, two of Beethoven, an aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. 
Were these really the earth’s greatest hits? At least they are some of the longest-lasting. 
The disc, which was made of gold-plated copper, was built to last one billion years...