NASA / JPL · 1977 · aboard Voyager 1 & 2

The Golden Record

A gold-plated message to the cosmos — Earth's sounds, music, images and greetings, sealed for a billion years. The most famous record never played on Earth.

115

images

languages

music tracks

~1 Gyr

lifetime

tap to flip

The six-week scramble

How do you explain humanity in six weeks?

The idea came from Voyager's project manager, John Casani, and landed on the desk of astronomer Carl Sagan. With the launches only weeks away, NASA gave Sagan a tiny budget and an almost impossible brief: assemble a message to represent all of Earth — to anyone, or anything, that might find it in the deep future.

Sagan pulled together a small committee of scientists and artists. They argued over what a single object should say about a whole planet, chased copyright permissions, recorded greetings in dozens of languages, and pressed it all onto a gold-plated disc — designed to survive a billion years in the vacuum of space. They had almost no time and almost no money. What they made is now the farthest-travelling artwork in history.

"This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings."— President Jimmy Carter's message, carried on the record

Brief fromJohn Casani, project manager

Chaired byCarl Sagan, Cornell

Budget$1,500

Production time~6 weeks

MediumGold-plated copper, 12″

Plays at16⅔ rpm

Copies flown2 — Voyager 1 & 2

Expected lifetime~1 billion years

The committee

Six people, one planet to summarise

NASA left the format and the contents entirely to Sagan. He assembled a team whose personal tastes and friendships — as much as any survey — shaped what humanity would say.

Carl Sagan

Executive Director

Astronomer and chair. Conceived the record as an heir to the Pioneer plaques and set its hopeful, humane tone.

Frank Drake

Technical Director

SETI pioneer. Devised the cover's scientific diagrams — the pulsar map and the binary instructions — building on his Pioneer-plaque work.

Ann Druyan

Creative Director

Led the sounds and music. Her own brainwaves, recorded while she thought of falling in love with Sagan, are encoded on the disc.

Timothy Ferris

Producer

Science writer and former Rolling Stone editor. Produced the audio montage and shaped the eclectic 90-minute music programme.

Jon Lomberg

Designer

Artist and frequent Sagan collaborator. Directed the visual content and the method for encoding 115 images into sound.

Linda Salzman Sagan

Greetings Organiser

Gathered the spoken greetings in 55 languages and drew the human figures. The English greeting is spoken by her six-year-old son, Nick.

Decode the cover

An instruction manual in pictures

The aluminium jacket is etched with everything a finder needs to play the record and locate its makers — using only physics and binary, no shared language assumed. Flip the disc to its cover, then click each diagram.

Cover element

Click a diagram on the cover

Each etching is a piece of an instruction manual written in the only languages we can assume are shared: mathematics, physics and binary counting. Click any glyph to read what it tells a finder.

⬡ pulsar map · ⬡ hydrogen clock · ⬡ playback · ⬡ raster · ⬡ calibration

What's on it

Sounds, voices, music, pictures

Spoken greetings in 55 languages, chosen to span the most-spoken tongues and the deep past. They run from Akkadian — spoken in Sumer ~6,000 years ago — to Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. The English greeting is famously spoken by Nick Sagan, Carl's six-year-old son: "Hello from the children of planet Earth."

AKKADIAN~4000 BCE

SUMERIANancient

HITTITEancient

GREEK"Greetings…"

ENGLISHchildren of Earth

MANDARIN"hope everyone's well"

ARABIC"peace"

HINDIgreetings

RUSSIAN"be healthy"

SWAHILIgreetings

NGUNIgood wishes

WUmodern Chinese

Recorded mostly by faculty from Cornell's language departments after UN delegate recordings fell through. A separate greeting from UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim opens the audio.

▶ Official NASA recording Play all 55 greetings, straight from NASA's archive

A "sound essay" assembled by Ann Druyan and Timothy Ferris — the voice of the planet itself, then of the life on it, then of us.

01Volcanoes, earthquakes, thunder — the young Earth

02Wind, rain, surf — the oceans and sky

03Crickets, frogs, birds; a hyena, an elephant, a chimpanzee

04The songs of humpback whales

05Footsteps, heartbeats, laughter; a kiss; a mother and child

06Tools, a sawing, a tractor, a Saturn V launch — Morse code: per aspera ad astra

07The brainwaves & heartbeat of Ann Druyan

▶ Official NASA recording Play the Sounds of Earth, the real montage

A hidden love letter

Tucked among the sounds is an hour of Ann Druyan's EEG and heartbeat, compressed to about a minute. She recorded it two days after she and Carl Sagan first confessed their love by phone. As the electrodes ran, she meditated on the history of Earth, the predicament of civilisation, and what it felt like to fall in love. Those exact thoughts, as brainwaves, are now in interstellar space — and the two married soon after.

▶ You can hear it — it isn't a separate track, but it's woven into the Sounds of Earth montage in the NASA player above. Near the end it surfaces as the rapid, firecracker-like pulses: that's her compressed heartbeat and brainwaves.

Ninety minutes, 27 selections, spanning continents and centuries — from Bach to Chuck Berry, Bulgarian folk to Navajo chant. The recordings are under copyright, so NASA didn't release them — but you can hear the complete record, music included, at the official remaster linked below.

01Bach — Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 · Germany

02"Kinds of Flowers" — court gamelan · Java

03Percussion · Senegal

04Pygmy girls' initiation song · Zaire

05"Morning Star" & "Devil Bird" · Aboriginal Australia

06"El Cascabel" — mariachi · Mexico

07"Johnny B. Goode" — Chuck Berry · USA

08Men's house song · New Guinea

09Shakuhachi — "Crane's Nest" · Japan

10Bach — Gavotte en rondeaux · Germany

11Mozart — Magic Flute, Queen of the Night · Austria

12"Chakrulo" — choir · Georgia

13Panpipes & drum · Peru

14"Melancholy Blues" — Louis Armstrong · USA

15Bagpipes — "Tchakrulo" · Azerbaijan

16Stravinsky — Rite of Spring, finale · Russia

17Bach — The Well-Tempered Clavier · Germany

18Beethoven — Symphony No. 5, 1st movt · Germany

19"Flowing Streams" — guqin · China

20Raga "Jaat Kahan Ho" — Kesarbai Kerkar · India

21"Dark Was the Night" — Blind Willie Johnson · USA

22Beethoven — String Quartet No. 13, Cavatina · Germany

▶ Legal previews · Spotify Hear samples of the music — full tracks play for signed-in Spotify users

Spotify-licensed recordings of the record's programme. Free accounts hear ~30-second previews; recordings may differ from the exact 1977 masters.

Copyright The 27 musical works are still under copyright — even the oldest (recorded ~1927) don't enter the US public domain until 2028.

So they can't be hosted or streamed here. To play the complete record with all the music, use the official, rights-cleared remaster — every track, in order:

▶ Play all 27 music tracks · goldenrecord.org →

115 images (plus a calibration circle) encoded as analog waveforms — diagrams, photographs and scenes chosen to explain our science, our world and ourselves, without leaning on any one culture.

Earth & the planets

Our solar system, Earth from space, continents and oceans

Science & maths

Counting, physical units, the DNA double helix, chemistry

Human anatomy

Body diagrams, reproduction, a fetus, the stages of life

Life on Earth

Plants, insects, fish, dolphins, birds and animals

People & culture

Eating, dancing, building; the Taj Mahal, a city, a classroom

The calibration circle

The first image — a plain circle that proves a correct decode

▶ View all 116 images — NASA's official gallery →

The censored couple

After complaints about nudity on the Pioneer plaques, NASA refused a photograph of a nude man and pregnant woman. It was replaced with a silhouette — though a separate anatomical diagram remained.

"Rock is adolescent"

Including Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" drew objections that rock was juvenile. Sagan's reply became famous: "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet."

How it works

Turning pictures into sound — and back

There were no digital files in 1977. Each picture was encoded as an analog waveform: scanned line by line, the brightness along each line drawn as a wiggling signal. Play it as audio and you hear a warble; decode the warble correctly and the picture reappears.

This little glyph is scanned into sound the same way the record's 115 images were — 512 lines per picture, each a brightness-modulated tone with a sync blip between lines.

The very first image is a simple circle. A finder who guesses the scan rate wrong gets an ellipse; only the correct rate yields a true circle — so the circle itself confirms the decoding is right. Drag to change the assumed scan rate:

Decoding scan rate — find the circle

✗ skewed — wrong scan rate

What it sounds like

The record's reference signals

You can play the real greetings and Sounds of Earth from NASA's archive in the tabs above. Here are the record's own reference signals — the tones and clocks etched into the cover — synthesised exactly in your browser. Press play on each.

The 1 kHz calibration tone

A pure 1,000 Hz reference pitch — the audio equivalent of the calibration circle, letting a finder check their playback speed.

The pulsar map, as rhythm

Each of the 14 pulsars is a precise cosmic clock. Heard as layered pulses, the "map to the Sun" becomes a polyrhythm.

The hydrogen clock

The real hyperfine line is 1,420 MHz — far too high to hear — so this is a low, symbolic stand-in with a slow "spin-flip" beat that defines the cover's units.

Stop everything

Silence all synthesised tones. Every sound on this page is generated in your browser — nothing is streamed.

Still out there

Both records are now in interstellar space — Earth's brainwaves, whale song and Bach drifting outward, long after the spacecraft fall silent.

Voyager 1 is currently — AU from the Sun · the Golden Record will outlast the Earth itself.

Hold it in your hands

Own the record · read its story

The official Ozma Records box set is the rights-cleared way to hear every greeting, sound and piece of music. And “Murmurs of Earth” — by Sagan and the team who made the record — is the definitive account of how it came to be.

Visit the shop → Books & the box set some links are affiliate links