(Credits: Far Out)
Thu 19 March 2026 21:30, UK
It’s an interesting hypothetical as to how alien life might receive our Earthly mash of sounds we call music.
It’s a human universal. Across aeons of time and every far-flung cultural corner, the creative need to conjure some form of melody, harmony, and rhythm stands as an instinctive constant since music’s earliest traces as much as 60,000 years ago, scoring our deepest spiritual rituals or serving as a slice of disposable fun. In pop’s case, often both.
Perhaps music is a universal beyond the stars? Musicology has been studied in the animal kingdom, from the whale’s siren or the bird’s morning tweet, but more scientifically credible are chimpanzees’ habit of rhytmically drumming on tree barks or logs with varying tempo and audio reverberations, surmised as a form of communication but may well be an activity engaged for the pleasure of it.
With this principle, it’s entirely reasonable to posit that extraterrestrial beings may similarly display a natural tendency toward creating pleasing sounds with increasing complexity, depending on their intelligence and cultural advancement. Yet, it’s likely that Mozart’s Requiem in D minor or Beethoven’s ‘Symphony No 9’ may present to alien ears – if indeed they even require the senses of sound – as a grinding mess of confusing noise amounting to little more than a bewildered indifference.
Is music elemental? Just as the cosmos shares the same periodic table no matter how remote in space, perhaps music is innately built on universal, creative structures that every intelligent life form on whatever planet will inexorably evolve to realise, currently whittling away a flute from the bone of a fallen creature, just as our stone age ancestors did at the dawn of time, to composing grand musical pieces light years ahead of our comprehension amid the twinkling technosignatures of interstellar civilisations.
We’re unlikely to ever find out anytime soon, but such astrobiology compelled NASA to launch a space probe programme in 1977 to, at the very least, offer a cultural capsule of Man’s existence in the universe to be potentially picked up by alien beings in a decamillennium or two.
So, what top 10 hits are aliens likely to hear?
While NASA handled the Voyager spacecraft missions, famed astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan chaired the committee to handle its ‘message in a bottle’ contents. Etched into the gold-plated record among the sounds and raster scan images of Earth’s life and culture was a collection of music collated by the team to best represent humanity’s compositional heritage.
Naturally, much of the tracklist is comprised of the classical canon, Bach, Mozart, and Stravinsky, all standing tall alongside highly select early 20th-century cuts and indigenous audio documentation. Even though it was the late 1970s, there was still some reluctance to include a number representing rock and roll, committee ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax deeming such inclusions as “adolescent.” “There are a lot of adolescents on the planet,” Sagan reportedly quipped.
And so, at number 11, in between Lorenzo Barcelata’s ‘El Cascabel’ and the traditional Mariuamangɨ Papua New Guinea piece, Chuck Berry’s immortal 1958 hit ‘Johnny B Goode’ was beamed into space as a piece indicating the pop charts’ importance to musical and cultural development.
It’s still out there, the Voyager Golden Records expected to pass within 1.6 light-years’ distance of the Gilese 445 star in approximately 40,000 years. When, hopefully, alien entities do uncover the “token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings” as President Jimmy Carter’s caption read, Berry’s lyrical illiterate country boy from New Orleans’ chase for stardom may well be realised beyond even our faintest imagination.
