[pierrec]

You could say the exact same thing, replacing "music" with "written language", or essentially anything you could put on the probe. The point is, we have zero reference allowing us to imagine the mind of a being capable of catching and analyzing the probe. Not even ourselves, we're too stupid.

Let's make the improbable assumption that someone will receive it, otherwise the exercise is futile. They probably won't be highly interested in our "advanced" knowledge of mathematics and physics, so let's only inscribe minimal required information to roughly convey our level of advancement, since our radiation-resistant media has limited storage.

So what's the most interesting data left? All I see is descriptive information about life on earth, and insights into the functioning of the human mind. This is where art comes in. That leaves us weighing the potential alien interest in different forms of art, and music turns out to be an art form that requires relatively little cultural context in order to be appreciated, while still having surprising depth and being an outstanding representation of our mind's uniqueness.

[tgb]

If we received a record from extraterrestrials, what would most like to see on it? Music would be awesome, of course, but chances are they don't have music, maybe they have something else but it would be meaningless to us, like an ant sending artistic pheromones, except far more bizarre since they'd share no common environment or past. Not meaningless to us would be details about their atmosphere, their society (if that were easily communicable), their technology (even if less advanced than ours), and - by far the biggest - their biology and that of their planet. There's some of that on the record, but it's clear to me that including more than, say, one song, is a service to the humans launching it, not the hypothetical receivers. Then again, in all likelihood, humans are the only pieces of intelligent life to every go near the Voyagers, so perhaps it's them who should be appeased.