William Hong wrote:

>On the wider topic at hand, there's one "experiment" whose results
>I would wish greatly to see, but which probably none of us ever will.
>That would be to see the reaction of some extraterrestrial being who
>came upon the Voyager spacecraft that are streaming away from the solar
>system, and who played the analog sound records that are lashed to them.
>These are the records which carry a number of Western classical and other
>types of art music, world musics, sounds of the earth, animals, people
>etc.  Would they associate a "language" to the music, in the same way
>they might analyze the human speech or bird call samples?

Very interesting notion!  I can't help wondering if these aliens might
try to decipher Bach's music as language and dismiss human speech as too
monotonous to contain information?  And what message they might decide
the music contains.

Dave Wolf