I've always been a big fan of music, and in recent years, I've lucky enough to work directly with quite a number of musicians on projects linked to my scientific work and that of various ESA missions.
Some have involved providing scientific consultation and conversation to help inspire and inform musicians, while others have seen me supplying imagery and making videos, to which the artists have set music.
Other projects have involved me performing on stage with orchestras, albeit talking about science rather than singing, dancing, or playing an instrument, and in a few cases, music (or perhaps more appropriately, "sounds") which I've made has been incorporated into released tracks and albums by people infinitely more talented than me.
Much of this grew out of my involvement with the Rosetta mission, but it has expanded considerably beyond to encompass other ESA missions including Gaia, BepiColombo, Solar Orbiter, JUICE, and JWST, as well as things with a wider scope.
So just for the record (cough), I thought it might be worth collating those various projects here, at least to the extent that I can remember all of them. Where possible, I've added links to the works, whether as videos or tracks available on Spotify, for example. And for convenience, they're ordered by time in reverse, starting with the most recent projects. There are almost 30 projects, so I'll start with a few and add more as I have time.
Vangelis – "Rosetta" (2016)
At the time of the deployment of the Philae lander from the ESA Rosetta spacecraft and its subsequent landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014, the legendary composer and synthesiser musician Vangelis wrote and donated three new tracks linked to the mission to ESA. Shortly before the landing, I visited Vangelis in Paris with my ESA colleague Carl Walker, and Vangelis said that he wanted to write a full album of new music inspired by the mission.
We had other meetings with him, and iterated on tracks and orderings for the album. I think I have three different versions, at least. We also suggested names for some of the tracks, and one of the ones I think I came up ( ireally should check back through my email) with was "Albedo 0.06", referring to the 6% reflectivity of the comet and, of course, also to Vangelis' 1976 album "Albedo 0.39", which is the reflectivity of Earth. We also suggested artwork mockups for the album cover based on some paintings done for the Rosetta mission, although in the end, he went with an outside graphics company.
The final album was released in 2016 and was nominated for a Grammy in the "Best New Age Album" category in 2017.
You can listen to the album on Spotify here. I have a signed copy of the album which I'll photograph and replace the image below with.
Edd Blakeley – "The Rosetta Suite" (2015)
Another musical project inspired by the ESA Rosetta mission was a classical soundtrack album by the British composer and producer, Edd Blakeley. He created the album using symphonic samples, but hoped to later have it recorded by a professional orchestra. As far as I know though, that didn't happen. I'm thanked in the album credits for providing support as Edd was creating the album.
Atanas Valkov – "Ambition" original soundtrack (2015)
In 2014, we released a short science fiction film called "Ambition" to help promote the ESA Rosetta mission. The film was made by the Polish company Platige Image, directed by Tomek Bagiński, starred Aiden Gillen and Aisling Franciosi, and can be seen here.
The main film and teaser trailer included original music by the Polish-Bulgarian composer Atanas Valkov. He subsequently expanded that into a full soundtrack album, with the music from the film and additional pieces.
In addition to being one of the executive producers of the film, my voice was sampled by Atanas from some complementary documentary material and used in a track called "Visitors". You can listen to that track and the whole album on Bandcamp here.
Moon Duo – "Killing Time" EP (2009)
I was asked by the then San Francisco-based psychedelic rock band, Moon Duo, comprising Ripley Johnson and Sanae Yamada, whether they could use one of my scientific images for the cover of their "Killing Time" EP. The image shows a composite of four silhouette circumstellar disks in the Orion Nebula, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope, work done with Bob O'Dell and issued by the Space Telescope Science Institute as a press release in 1995.
