The Avalanches are Digitizing and Converting a 1974 Broadcast Signal Into Music

A historic piece of intergalactic communication will soon be ready for our listening pleasure.

Author:
Cameron Sunkel
Publish date:
Jun 20, 2020

A historic piece of intergalactic communication will soon be ready for our listening pleasure.

A message that was first used in an attempt to contact intelligent life is now being turned into music. That's right, if you thought you'd seen it all when it comes to clever sampling and creative audio to MIDI conversions, Australian electronic duo, The Avalanches, are about to take things a step further.

It's unknown whether Frank Drake, creator of the 1974 Arecibo Message, envisioned his work being turned into a song several decades later, but that is exactly what's been teased in The Avalanches' latest post.

The astronomer and astrophysicist's now-famous radio wave message was originally beamed to a star cluster 25,000 light-years away. The message contained basic information about humanity and planet Earth. At the time of transmission, the Arecibo Message was the world's most powerful broadcast deliberately beamed into space.

Drake shared the message's original code with The Avalanches who have since worked with the SETI Institute to digitize the code into a binary format. The group shared a picture of the code, commenting that it's now ready for its ultimate conversion into MIDI. If all goes to plan, we'll be hearing the historic communication in song-form sooner than later.

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