Guwahati: An Assamese artist is helping turn the death of stars—and the birth of new worlds—into music for an international project linked to NASA’s COSI mission.Acclaimed Indian composer, singer and songwriter Joi Barua, who hails from Assam, is part of a groundbreaking international collaboration linking NASA astrophysics with the performing arts.The collaboration connects NASA’s COSI mission with Cosmic Rhapsody, a global performing arts project for which Barua has composed pivotal songs inspired by the wonders of the cosmos.Led by John Tomsick at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, COSI is designed to study gamma rays from cosmic events such as supernovae and understand how the elements that make up our world are forged in stars. Barua’s music translates this science into song, creating a bridge between astrophysics and the performing arts.Barua said Cosmic Rhapsody, “a musical reverence to the wonders of the cosmic space”, was created by storytelling and songwriting duo Susan Lim and Christina Teenz Tan. French composer Manu Martin is the chief composer, orchestrator and arranger for the orchestral work.“Conceived as an immersive performing arts experience combining live symphonic scoring, cinematic animation, and pop songs, the story follows a fictional partnership between a Human and an AI travelling into space to search for planetary solutions to Earth’s environmental crisis,” he added.During a visit to UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, the creators of Cosmic Rhapsody discovered a connection between the project’s climax and NASA’s COSI mission. The songs ‘Star Among the Cosmic Clouds’ and ‘Confetti Storm’, both composed by Barua to lyrics by Lim, centre on the death of a star and the scattering of stardust that helps seed new worlds.“The theme closely echoes COSI’s scientific mission of studying soft gamma rays from cosmic events such as supernovae to understand how stars forge the chemical elements that make up life and the universe around us,” he added.Talking to TOI about his role in the project, Barua said, “My role in Cosmic Rhapsody is primarily that of a composer. Susan and Christina are the principal creators and co-creators of the project. I was the first composer to come on board after they heard and liked some of my earlier work, and that collaboration eventually brought us to where we are today.”He added that he was one of four or five composers involved in the project for “at least nearly a decade”. “My job is essentially to give musical articulation to scientific thoughts and ideas — to take those concepts and give them a definitive musical edge. For a composer, it is about seamlessly translating one language into another. It is challenging, but absolutely amazing,” he said.The collaboration is expected to culminate in two major events: the US premiere of Cosmic Rhapsody at Hollywood Bowl on July 27 next year, presented with Los Angeles Philharmonic and featuring pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, followed by the orbital launch of NASA’s COSI mission from Cape Canaveral.Barua said one of the project’s most meaningful aspects was his creative collaboration with animator and director Samudra Kajal Saikia, who created the visuals. Saikia also hails from Assam.“To have two artists from Assam shaping the auditory and visual soul of a global, NASA-aligned project is truly special. While building melodic arcs to celebrate the exploding star, Samudra translated those exact musical dynamics frame-by-frame into vivid, swirling colours of cosmic stardust. It’s a wonderful cultural milestone for our home state on an international stage,” he added.Barua and Saikia earlier worked together on a song titled ‘Rava’, inspired by Assamese warrior-artist Bishnu Rava, Gaji Rava and an incident from 1949.“We worked on the song along with collaborators Ibson Lal Barua from Assam and George Brooks from San Francisco, one of the foremost saxophone players in the world. Samudra brought an extraordinary visual dimension to the song, creating a video. That work was noticed by Susan Lim at a conference in Singapore. She felt that I could bring music to a story she was developing, and that became the genesis of Cosmic Rhapsody,” the singer said.Barua added that Lim was the driving lyrical and narrative force behind the songs. “In her lyrics for both the songs, she explored a profound truth: a star must sacrifice its existence in a supernova for its elements to scatter and seed new worlds. That imagery of stardust raining down as celebratory confetti gave me an emotional launchpad. In my melodies, I didn’t treat the explosion as a tragedy, but as a euphoric act of creation,” he said.Barua said representing India in a project connecting science, music and the performing arts was deeply humbling. He noted that India has a long cultural reverence for the cosmos and music, alongside its achievements in space science through ISRO.Contributing as an Indian composer to a project associated with NASA’s COSI mission, he said, underscored the idea that science and imagination can work together. He added that bringing science and the performing arts together opens up a canvas as vast as the universe itself.
