Story of Your Life — Pioneer Plaque

Pioneer Plaque of the Piano

Introduction

        In order to convey the concept of the piano to the heptapod aliens in Ted Chiang’s Story of My Life, a few preliminary explanations are required. The concepts that need to be established with the aliens before displaying the piano: human hearing mechanisms, music in the broadest terms, and musical instruments. On page 14 of the short story, the scientists mention that the aliens have a logogram for ‘hear’ but don’t specify the auditory mechanisms of the heptapod. From this, we can make our first etchings on the pioneer plaque—a logogram for ‘human’ followed by a logogram for ‘hear’, both of which have already been created by the linguist in the story. This shows the act of listening, however, we must create a representation of sound waves after it to express that humans are listening to a type of sound. To do this, we will use a simple diagram of the human hearing system that accompanies the earlier logograms, pictured below, without the text of course. 

        Logically, the following step is to introduce the instrument that creates the sound. But we know, from the reading that the aliens process and interpret their world in a particularly functional way—in a goal-oriented process. Therefore, we must convey 

All things considered, we must also show a cause and effect relationship between interacting with the piano keys and creating a sound emitted from the piano. 

 

Three components of our pioneer plaque

1. Picture of piano, notes, human auditory organ and anatomy, human and illustrations of how they work

        We will present a photo of the piano to show what the music instrument looks like. The notes are logograms which can be easily understood by heptapods. We will also present the photo of the human auditory organ and its anatomy to show how humans receive the sound generated by the instrument. Then we will use illustrations to explain how the three components connect to each other and form the musical expression.

2. Two spectrographs to visualize the audio file

• The first spectrograph: We will transform the audio file of piano chords into a spectrograph in case heptapods’ sound-receiving system is different from ours and cannot hear the audio file. The spectrograph will show them the fundamentals of piano chords’ composition, such as the frequency of each note that make up the chord. 
•  The second spectrograph: We will transform the audio file of a piano recital (with only the piano sound). In this way, heptapods can understand humans’ auditory experience of piano performance as a whole.

3. Video of Piano playing

        The video will be recording the same piano recital as the audio file and will be shown together with the second spectrograph we mentioned above. In this way, heptapods can learn about human culture related to the piano.