h only becomes smaller and better with each successive year – has been profoundly transformative in how we hear, learn, understand, and use music. In a beautifully abstract way – or perhaps profoundly concrete way – the wave file is the most precise manner to encode musical meaning. It is so universally applicable and mathematically fundamental, that we have felt comfortable sending such musical artifacts to the stars in hopes that perhaps an alien race or a distant future version of ourselves might find it floating in the outer emptiness around our star (see Figure 16). This manner of sonic encryption is so powerful, so precise, so fundamental to the function of physics and our universe that we feel confident that the modest handful of wave files precisely engraved to the posterity of perhaps hundreds of billions of years on a golden disc,  if found by any intelligent life form, will communicate, in some fashion, the intellect of us who encoded it and our noble and urgent search for meaning in millennia of wave summation.
Figure 16: The Kepler Golden Record, on which is encoded our lingual, musical, semiotic, and mathematical "hello" to the universe and any intelligent life form which may, in the distant future, find it floating amongst the stars.
 See Brün, Herbert. When Music Resists Meaning: The Major Writings of Herbert Brün.; Smith, Stuart Saunders, and Thomas DeLio. Words and Spaces: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Musical Experiments in Language and Sonic Environments. I often personally cite Professor Paul Koonce from the University of Florida for this quotation, though I know it was never originally his; I simply recall in many classes on style and electro-acoustic music him returning to this phrase and the aesthetic, philosophical, and linguistic implications of such as idea.
 For example, while our “modern” system of musical notation has been present, in some form, since arguably the end of the 16th century and assuredly by the beginning of the 17th century, modern expectations of this system have only arrived in the past 100 years: the beaming of rhythmic groups no matter the instrument (see vocal music of the 19th century for example), a panoply of dynamic markings, precise tempo markings, irregular time-signatures (5/8 and the like), non-pitched percussion notation, etc.
 Many conjectures have been made to the Highland’s relative non-adoption of European polyphony and the persistent development of high-art monophonic music like the Piobaireachd. However, the simplest explanation is the Highland’s geographic isolation from England and Europe generally. See Key, Jordan Alexander. Piobaireachd: The Origins of the Traditional Music of the Great Highland Bagpipes of Scotland as It Relates to Early Harp Music and Liturgical Chant from the British Isles. Master's thesis, The College of Wooster, 2013. Wooster: College of Wooster, OH.
 Generally, vowels represent pitch (of which there are only nine) while consonants the systemized embellishments.
 The system of bagpipe tuning also come under challenge as well, still reflecting a just-intoned, medieval, non-equal-tempered tradition.
 Interestingly, one of my own ancestors, the last name Key being an American-English corruption of the clan name MacKay upon immigration to the United States.
 As found in the contemporaneously published Campbell Canntaireachd.
 Donaldson, William. The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society, 1750-1950: Transmission, Change and the Concept of Tradition. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2008. The “s” in both “unrecognised” and “organisation” are reflective of the original source.
 And perhaps a modest rhythmic notation, though this is still highly debatable and only theoretical.
 Again, this is highly debatable and there is much literature to this end.
 Namely, trochaic, iambic, dactylic, anapaestic, spondaic, and tribrachic.
 Prominent composers of this style of music include many anonymous composers of the Ars Nova Notre Dame and Tournai Cathedral School as well as Philippe de Vitry (fl. c. 1314), Bernard de Cluny (fl. c. 1360), and Guillaume de Ma