Guwahati: A project born from a simple idea – using music to help people feel and understand cosmic events, with a little help from AI – has grown into a full-blown international performing arts project, featuring animation, science and space, and two artists from Assam.NASA-linked Cosmic Rhapsody, co-created by physician-scientists Susan Lim and Christina Teenz Tan, combines classical crossover music, modern symphonic pop, animation, science and space.Joi Barua, a singer-composer from Assam, composed two songs written by Lim — Star Among the Cosmic Clouds and Confetti Storm. The songs centre on the dramatic death of a star and the scattering of stardust that helps seed new worlds.Samudra Kajal Saikia, a poet, art historian and animator, joined the project as its animation artist. Together, the two Assamese artists became part of a project exploring human-AI relationships, planetary healing and the cosmos.Lim told TOI that the narrative “Cosmic Rhapsody” follows an AI-enabled inanimate companion named ALAN, who evolves into an ‘ALANaut’ and embarks on an interstellar mission with its human partner, Christina, to seek solutions for planetary renewal, climate resilience and ecological healing on Earth.The project took shape after Lim was invited to deliver a keynote on robotics in India in Bangalore in 2023. Instead of focusing only on clinical or technological developments, she introduced audiences to ALAN through a holographic projection and explored the future of companionship between humans and artificial intelligence and synthetic entities.She ended the presentation with music. Barua joined her on stage to perform The ALAN Song before thousands of delegates. The audience’s response convinced Lim that science could be communicated through music, animation, storytelling and visual narratives, rather than data alone.Lim’s association with Barua began at an INK Conference in Singapore in 2016, where she was a speaker and he was performing.“His performance, energy on stage and artistic vocals immediately struck me,” Lim said.During lunch, she shared lyrics she had written for The ALAN Song, the first piece in the LIM Trilogy, and asked Barua to compose the music. Released in 2021, the song marked the beginning of their collaboration.Barua later introduced Lim to Saikia at an INK Conference in Hyderabad in 2017. Impressed by Saikia’s work, Lim invited him to join the LIM Trilogy as its animation artist.The project’s connection with space science deepened in Dec 2025, when the team visited UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory during the North American premiere of LIM Fantasy of Companionship for Piano and Orchestra.There, they found parallels between Cosmic Rhapsody’s themes of stellar evolution and NASA’s upcoming Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) mission, led by principal investigator John Tomsick.For Lim, it was a striking example of “Science meets the performing arts.”
