A cosmic milestone in the history of music

Something weird and nerdy today: a nice ‘The Goody I Found’ (TGIF) that combines my enthusiasm for music and visualisation.

Last week I found this LinkedIn post by RobertoMensa: the data and an Excel visualisation of the ‘Unknown Pleasures’ album cover by ‘Joy Division’.
Really great, thanks!

Joy Division – and later New Order – were so important for my musical life. Who doesn’t know the song ‘Love will tear us apart’, which – unfortunately – became famous in Germany through Paul Young’s version.
In 1979, Joy Division released their debut album ‘Unknown Pleasures’, which is now regarded as a milestone in music history and introduced the post-punk era.

The cover of Unknown Pleasures shows ‘A stacked series of jagged lines displayed incoming radio waves from pulsar CP1919 […] A pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits a radio-frequency beam that sweeps through space like a lighthouse beacon.’
Harold D. Craft Jr. – a student at the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico – published the visualisation in 1970 as part of his PhD.

At the end of the 1970s, guitarist Bernard Sumner found the graphic in ‘The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy’ in a library in Manchester and, together with Peter Saville, created this iconic album cover.

The legacy of the design still holds strong. Nowadays there is even a chart type called Joyplot and an online site, where you can build your own pulsar visuals: https://lnkd.in/e-sHdcYT

I haven’t ordered the T-shirt yet … or a tattoo after all 🙃

Have a nice weekend

Lars

PS: The whole story is told in this video: https://vimeo.com/51365288

This file is licenced under the Creative Com