In a recent review in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Patrick Valiquet discusses Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth by Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“As venerable music theorists Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding map out in their recent book Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth (Zone Books, 2021), scientific and popular consensus during the Space Race held music to be an obvious manifestation of humanity’s power to reach across the abyss of otherness. Their book is partly a history of the Golden Record itself, and partly an experiment in defining how a music theorist today might go about reasserting something like Sagan’s optimistic appeal to universality.”