On August 20, 1977, the recording of Guan Pinghu's piano piece "Flowing Water" was engraved on a gold-sprayed copper record and launched by the American "Voyager" spacecraft When it reaches space, it will run indefinitely and will not stop for hundreds of millions of years. It is said that this is a tribute to the possible existence of super intelligent creatures in space. Such a romantic stroke of genius has become a cliché nowadays. But the process by which Guan Pinghu's "Flowing Water" was selected for this album is rarely known.

The record carried by the "Voyager" is 120 minutes long, of which 30 minutes introduce information about the earth, life, human beings, etc., and the remaining 90 minutes are all music, intended to use the most abstract art. Language communicates information with life in outer space. At that time, music editor Andrew Young called Columbia University professor Zhou Wenzhong and asked him to recommend a Chinese piece of music. He originally thought that Zhou Wenzhong needed time to think about it, but he didn't expect that Zhou Wenzhong replied without hesitation: ""Flowing Water"! This is a meditation song about human consciousness and the resonance of the universe. It is played with a guqin. This instrument was played in Jesus Christ. It existed thousands of years before the birth of China. Since the time of Confucius, the song "Flowing Water" has been an integral part of Chinese culture."

But in order to show the different musical cultures of mankind. , more than 50 representative pieces of music from all over the world were initially selected. In the end, the judges decided to select 27 pieces from them, and the length was still very limited. Guan Pinghu's performance of "Flowing Water" lasted seven minutes and thirty-seven seconds, which was undoubtedly too long. Zhou Wenzhong insisted that "Flowing Water", which is more than seven minutes long, cannot be deleted at all and must be included in its entirety. This proposal was unanimously approved by all judges. "Flowing Water" became the longest piece of music on that album and the first to be selected. The next longest one is the first movement of Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony", which is seven minutes and twenty seconds.

Zhou Wenzhong’s appreciation and confidence in "Flowing Water" stem from his understanding of Chinese music tradition and his affection for the guqin. The piano piece "Willow Color New" and the orchestral piece "Fishermen's Song" he created based on the guqin piece "Yangguan Sandie" and "Fishermen's Song" fully drew on the characteristics and skills of the guqin. In "Liu Se Xin", there seems to be the distinctive "noise" of the left hand playing the strings in the guqin, as well as the unique charm of "yin" and "猱"; in "Fisher Song", piano and percussion are used to artistically reproduce the guqin performance. The middle right fingering technique simulates the timbre changes of "scattering", "pressing" and "pan".