TRANSMISSION: MUSIC FOR ALIEN CIVILIZATIONS

The Beatles song broadcasted by NASA to Polaris last February was "Across the Universe". If you were an alien, would you prefer to receive that particular song or a set of 13 cool tracks of electronic music?

"The music that I and the other participating producers have made for this record/transmission is specially made for this purpose. The music is not made for human ears but for alien lifeforms. We don't know how these aliens look, how they communicate, what senses they have, what values they build their societies on - or what technologies they use.

"We must assume they are familiar with basic maths, otherwise they can't build machines like radio telescopes. Some of the musical pieces hold mathematical codes, some hidden messages with binary figures, scales, tempo references, frequencies that tells them what frequencies we can hear. The task for the artists invited for this project was to make music telling something about humans and Earth. Not an easy task but very challenging. So I would most definitely prefer the music we transmitted because it's made for aliens.

"Don't get me wrong, The Beatles are good, but maybe only to white people from the USA and Europe that were young in the 60s and 70s, and that's probably a minority in the universe."

Is becoming a Star in Space your ultimate dream?

"The problem is that it will take many years for the music to reach a possible alien music lover. So even if they get one of our tracks and think it rocks, and maybe have a technology to travel with the speed of light, it will take them many years to get here. And if they then go into a record shop on Earth and ask, "Do you have this track on vinyl?", probably no one will remember the track anymore.

"Our closest neighbour star system is Alpha Centauri and it seems there aren't any planets over there. There are some other systems - BetaCVn and Epsilon Indi A - that have several planets and might have a planet like ours. They are not too far away to reach but far enough to make the trip pretty time consuming. My own track is somewhat influenced by minimal techno and click'n'cuts and that music style will be very outdated by the time it gets there :)

"Rockstar in space? - probably not. Cyberspace maybe!"

1 | 2 | 3 all interviews