I must have been eight or nine the first time an adult told me, with unmistakable pride, that a Georgian song floated somewhere beyond the edge of the solar system. I remember nodding my head the way children do when a fact is clearly assumed to matter to them, without really understanding what it means. Space, at that age, was just a word that meant far away. What remained was not science. It was the tone the adults used when they said it: the specific, quiet pride of a small country pointing to something huge and saying: that’s ours too. It took me a long time, and a fair amount of research with adults, to really understand what had been sent, why it was chosen despite enormous odds, and what it means that it remains, five decades later, the only Georgian object in the universe further from home than Georgia itself. A song that every Georgian child grows up without half understanding. The song is called Chakrulo, a three-part polyphonic folk song from the Kakheti region of eastern Georgia that dramatizes preparations for a battle. It is built around two highly ornamented solo vocal lines over a full choral base, a structure that gives it a very particular texture: two individual voices improvising and exchanging ornamentation over a stable, solid wall of sound beneath them. In 2001, UNESCO recognized Georgian vocal polyphony as a masterpiece of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of humanity, and Chakrulo was cited by name as one of its defining examples. It is one of 27 pieces of music that NASA selected in 1977 for the Voyager Golden Record, a gold-plated phonograph record carried aboard both Voyager spacecraft, assembled by a committee led by Carl Sagan to represent the sounds, languages and music of Earth for whoever might eventually find it. The album’s other selections range from Bach and Beethoven to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Peruvian pan flutes. Chakrulo is listed in the NASA catalog simply as “Georgian SSR, chorus,” a piece of Cold War-era cataloging that quietly erased the fact that he wasn’t Soviet at all: He was Georgian, specific to a place with its own language, its own polyphonic tradition, and its own reasons to be proud of it. The Two Men Who Didn’t Know They Were Going to Space What I didn’t know as a child, and only learned much later, is that the two soloists on the actual Voyager recording had no idea they had been selected for any of this. According to a report on the song’s history, they found out about it only when they arrived in the United States for a concert tour two weeks after the launch of Voyager in September 1977; The disk was already somewhere beyond the Moon when someone told them where their voices were going. One of those two original lead singers, Rostom Saginashvili, whose singing career had ended in the 1990s, returned to Tbilisi for a fortieth anniversary concert in 2017, organized jointly by the U.S. embassy and the Georgian government, where he met the mission’s former director of programs in front of an audience that had grown up, like me, hearing the story secondhand long before understanding it. Two men sang on a recording in a Kakheti valley, and two weeks passed before either of them discovered that they had already left the planet. Why couldn’t a piano play this if it tried? The detail that changed the way I heard the song, once I understood it, is the tuning. Georgian polyphonic singing does not use the same twelve-tone equal temperament system around which a piano is built. According to the musicological analysis of the tradition, its intervals are located in their own distinct space: a slightly compressed major second, a “neutral” third that is neither the major third nor the minor third that Western ears are trained on, a slightly stretched fourth, a compressed major sixth, a stretched minor seventh. None of them exist as playable notes on a standard keyboard, tuned as all pianos in the world have been for the last three centuries. You can’t sit and listen to Chakrulo’s harmonies on a piano, not because you lack skill, but because the notes he needs simply aren’t there to press. I think that’s the part that really earns me the pride that I grew up absorbing without examining. It is not that a Georgian song has entered an exclusive and famous list. It’s that the record now traveling into interstellar space carries a set of harmonic relationships that the dominant tuning system of Western music literally cannot produce: a genuinely different way of organizing sound, sent outward as evidence that there is more than one way to make music mean something. A milestone with a five-decade fuse The spacecraft that holds that record, Voyager 1, is about to cross a distance that has never been achieved by anything built by humans. On November 18, 2026, by NASA’s own calculations, Voyager 1 will be exactly one light-day from Earth, about 25.9 billion kilometers, or about 173 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. A radio signal sent from mission control that day, traveling at the speed of light, would take a full 24 hours to reach the spacecraft, and another full day to get a response, if there were anyone there to send it. Voyager 1 was released in September 1977, the same fall that those two Georgian soloists discovered where their recording had gone. It has spent nearly fifty years accumulating that distance at about 128,700 kilometers per hour (about 80,000 miles per hour), and it will continue to operate long after its instruments finally run out of power sometime in the early 2030s—a piece of 1970s engineering that, this November, will become the first human-built object to put a full day of light between it and the planet that built it. Every one of the twenty-seven songs on that record, including Chakrulo, will cross that same threshold with it, still encoded in gold, untouched by anyone since the technicians who printed it. What finally got me, I don’t think I understood, when I was a kid and listening to this story told with pride, that pride wasn’t really the point, or it wasn’t the only one. Instead, I’ve sat there, doing the research that an adult does rather than simply nodding, it’s something closer to disbelief that it happened: that a recording of two men’s voices, made in a specific valley in Kakheti, tuned to intervals that a piano cannot produce, ended up chosen by a small committee in 1977 to represent the sound of an entire species to anyone who might eventually be listening. No one singing or recording that song could have imagined the distance it would eventually travel, in any sense of the word. My own work, intermittently, involves thinking about how people attribute meaning to places and carry that meaning outward when they leave them. I don’t think I fully appreciated, until I wrote this, that Chakrulo is the most literal version of that idea I’ll ever encounter: the sound of a place, thrown outward, still traveling, further from home with each passing year, and still, forty-nine years later, unmistakably itself.
