Brandenburg Concerto No. 2
J.S. Bach - BWV 1047
Encoded: May 5, 2026
LIFE codec v1.0
The Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major was the first piece of music on the Voyager Golden Record - humanity's most deliberate attempt to communicate across interstellar distance. In 1977, it was encoded on a physical gold-plated disc and launched aboard Voyager 1 at 17 kilometres per second.
It was the first .life file ever encoded.
The encoding
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Source | BWV 1047, public domain MIDI |
| Tracks | 10 |
| Notes | 14,068 |
| Duration | 7.9 minutes |
| Wavelength range | 497nm - 645nm |
| Colour range | Cyan through deep orange-red |
| Scaling constant | 2⁴⁰ = 1,099,511,627,776 |
| Reversible | Yes |
| Lossless | Yes |
What the codec reveals
The Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 is one of Bach's most harmonically rich works. The codec maps its ten voices across a wavelength range of nearly 150 nanometres - from the cyan of the upper voices to the deep orange-red of the bass lines.
The harmonic relationships that make the piece musically extraordinary are preserved exactly in the light encoding. The counterpoint between voices is visible as colour relationships. The mathematical structure that Bach composed survives translation into a completely different medium.
Download
The Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 is in the public domain.