In the long human history, there are millions of elements, or garments in other words, that enrich the spiritual world of human being. The development of our knowledge about science and the growth of the world’s economy enable most people to pursue more spiritual capital beyond living necessity. On a limited-space land, the beautiful blue planet, different forms of entertainment or art are given birth to fulfill people’s needs, but only few of these forms can be universally enjoyed by all the people, due to the restrains of language, geography, or cultural conflicts. Brought by human’s different uses of language, the difficulty to share between humans is very similar with the blocked communication with Heptapod mentioned by Chiang in The Story of My Life. As a result, our initial incentive that in the Aluminum Plaque we are going to introducing a kind of language that’s universal at least for all the human beings: “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star… How I wonder what you are…”. But we will for sure jump out of the restriction of lyrics, and just play the essence — music notes.

​

The Aluminum Plaque will be presented as a sound equipment, with seven hole-like sound outlets which each represents a not in the classical diatonic note system (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti). How the sound is conveyed into the receivable pitch range for Heptapods? According to Chiang, heptapods receive sounds at a very high frequency that “we are unable to hear”. As a result, we want the frequency changeable. Luckily, there is a key element in our music system that makes it possible to play the music even in a very high frequency -- octave. There are countless sets of the diatonic notes as along as we adjust the frequency of notes. We attached a forum below which indicates the frequency (represented by F afterwards) and wavelength (represented by W in the following) of each note humans are familiar with. Take “Do” as an example, the F of the first Do is 16.35Hz and the W is 2109.89cm; after an octave, the numbers are individually 32.70Hz and 1054.94cm. We can see that the frequency is amplified a time and the wavelength is divided by two times. This is also the relationship between the same note in different octaves. The higher the pitch is, the F will times the nth power of 2 and the W will divided by the nth power of 2.

​

Let’s talk more about the equipment. It will automatically play the melodic line of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, starting from the octave humans, in which the F of the Do is 130.81 and the W is 263.74; then the octave will automatically change to higher pitches. It will eventually go into an octave where heptapods get to receive the sound. Another interesting fact about our equipment is that there are seven transparent holes on our equipment, and there are seven limbs of heptapods. We designed this equipment according to heptapod’s body structure: each hole corresponds to a note in an octave, the one hole which is left allows heptapods to increase or decrease an octave. That’s why there is also a manual mode of the equipment: not only can the pitch be manually adjusted, but it can also be manually played as heptapods emit ink-like substances- the substances created by heptapods to write - through the hole (Figure 1). Who knows whether these heptapods will become keyboard masters afterwards. After observing if heptapod react to music on certain octave, we then translate our famous music into the octave that heptapods accepts to strength their understanding of music notes, which may also tell them how music makes human joyful and arouses our emotion.