Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 06 2017, @07:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the 45-or-33-1/3? dept.

A rather cool article at BoingBoing on decoding the images on the Voyager golden records from scratch. The records contain "more than 100 images encoded as audio signals" and

Donating their time and expertise to the project, engineers at Colorado Video projected each Voyager slide onto a television camera lens, generating a signal that their machine converted into several seconds of sound per photo. A diagram on the aluminum cover of the Golden Record explains how to play it and decode the images. Four decades later, Ron Barry followed the instructions.

The Voyager Golden Records:

[...] are phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. The records contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. Those records are considered as a sort of a time capsule.

The article describes the decoding process and also links to a video showing the results of the decode in real time against the original soundtrack.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday September 07 2017, @09:11AM

    by KritonK (465) on Thursday September 07 2017, @09:11AM (#564489)

    I was amazed at how much thought was put into making this record. Yes, decoding the images is a big struggle, but there are enough clues about the existence of interesting data on the disk and about how to decode them, that a determined person could actually do the decoding. The first image is used for calibration. It is just a circle, which you can even see as a squashed oval, just by looking at the waveform. There is a picture of the moon's surface that makes sense only if you choose correctly whether high values represent light or dark. Finally, there is information about how many and which color components to use, to produce color pictures. Once you've reached this far, then information starts flooding in. This [wp.com], picture, e.g., explains our numbering system, how we do addition, and how we represent fractions, all in one slide. One picture is really worth a thousand words!

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2