What if you could answer an ancient
burning question by playing a musical
instrument?
Since the Greeks first introduced the
concept of the music of the spheres, the
idea that the movements in the cosmos
could be described musically
has captivated humankind's deepest
thinkers and inspired some of the
world's greatest works of art,
science, and philosophy.  400 years ago
Johannes Kepler famously laid out his
three laws of planetary motion.
Most people who know about Kepler think
of him as the father of modern astronomy
who proved once and for all that the
planets revolve around the Sun in
elliptical orbits.
What most people don't know is that
Kepler made these scientific discoveries
through music
and a relentless pursuit of truth; and a
conviction that everything in the
universe is governed by rules of harmony.
Rather than blindly following religious
dogma, he was one of the first to insist
that mathematical models of reality
should match observational and empirical data.
What does the "Music of the Spheres" sound like?
And how does it feel to be immersed
in it,
as a multiplayer immersive game where
everything that is seen and heard is
generated
by the beautiful harmonic motion of our
solar system and beyond? 
Concordia is an entirely new kind of
musical instrument
that feels like a video game while
teaching advanced astronomical concepts.
It will be an open source, growing,
modular instrument,
created and played by the community in
their own custom cockpits.
Hello everyone I am MaryLiz Bender and
I'm so excited
to introduce you all to Kelly Snook, a
dear friend of mine
and founder of Kepler Concordia, which is
the main subject of our conversation
today.
I'd really like to hear from you: how on
Earth did Kepler Concordia come to be?
(Laughs) First of all, Kepler Concordia is just still coming
into being, so
it is a process and it's been
about 19 years now, this journey, so I'm
just going to talk a little bit about
the journey. But before I do that,
I just want to say... first, I want to
acknowledge
the enormous privilege that we have to
be talking about these things, to be
thinking about these things,
especially in a time like this... that
we're coming together to talk about
humans to Mars and art and science
and
beauty and exploration and the
destiny of humanity...
and at the same time there's this real
tension with what's actually happening
in our real world [Black Lives Matter]. And I'm...
it's important to me to...
yeah ...to acknowledge that. So Kepler
Concordia has been a very slow burn for
the last
20 or so years of my life, during which
I was working at NASA for about half
that time and then working in music
technology for the other half.
I'm constantly in this learning process
trying to understand
how all of this fits into that larger
context of making the world a better
place. I like not to lose sight of that.
So, the Kepler Concordia project has
evolved through
all of these different twists and turns
of my career
as i've been trying to figure out... how do
we make the work world a better place?
And then what role does
does science and technology and art
and music play in all of that?  How Kepler
Concordia came to be was I was
working...I had...
okay, so let's back up just for a
minute just to give some context. When I
was a little girl,
I thought that my thing was music and
that I was going to be a musician
both my parents were musicians, my family...
it was just full of music, there was music
all the time.
I wanted to do music, but then as I got
older,
that prospect got more and more scary to
me. And it got to the point where it was so
scary that I had to just decide
I wasn't going to do that and I was
going to do something else.
There wasn't really anything else that
was obvious to me, so I just
kind of randomly chose Aerospace
Engineering, not out of a burning desire...
...as you do! Such was the extent of my
fear about music was that I
went all the way to PhD in Aerospace
Engineering!
But during that time,  I was
working on music
and doing always doing music "on the side"
and at some point I started working at
NASA, and I started...
I decided that I needed to learn how to
produce music.
And so, for a long time, I was doing music
production and learning music technology
in my recording studio, and then I was
working at NASA- in
science and engineering at NASA - and, you
know, that was exhausting because I was
doing two different things.
And in the middle of all that I was
invited
to give a talk - a speaking tour, actually -
in Japan.
This was 2001, so I'd just been working
at NASA for a couple of years,
I had just started doing music production, so
I was in the beginning stages of both of
those things. And I was invited to
Japan to speak about The Mystery of
Space and Man.
And this title! This title is daunting
for anybody... They wanted me to talk about
how, in history, how astronomy
impacted Humanity's understanding -
collective understanding - of ourselves!
And...you know,  that would really
require
me to zoom completely out and
and think about this idea of space
and space science and astronomy
affecting us... our whole psyche.
And in... so I had to do a lot of
preparing, because I had some serious
imposter syndrome
about that speaking tour! And so, I
started studying and I started reading
up
about Kepler, and I was reintroduced... I
had learned
about Kepler's mathematics, but
what I rediscovered... kind of... or
discovered,  I'm not sure,
was this idea that music was not
art! Music was not entertainment! Music
wasn't
a tool for expressing yourself! What
music was,
in Kepler's time, was one of the tools
for exploring reality!
so along with arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy,
and music, those four things comprise the
Quadrivium!
And I thought, wow!  How is that possible?
And then I...
I realized that Kepler had made these
discoveries in science that he's famous
for -
basically launched modern astronomy -
through music!
And not only through music, but through
music and spirituality,
both of which are not... we're not really
seeing as legitimate
pathways for investigating reality.
And this was just... blew open my world and
I was super fascinated by it, and that
just started
this slow burn. Like, I had a sense that
the
the key to what would really light
me up
is... was... somewhere in there figuring out
trying to figure out, how did he do that?!
How did he use music this way?!
This was so interesting to me when I
first discovered Concordia, I
did not really know this about Kepler,
myself.
You said something that 
really stuck out to me in one of your
other
interviews. You said that Kepler gave
glimmers of a world
free of the Venn diagram we've forced
ourselves to be
slave to! Can you speak to that a little
more?
Yes. At the time when I discovered him
and his work - RE-discovered him and his
work - and really started thinking about
music in this new way,
in my world - especially at NASA - there was
a world... a science world,
which is actually a different world than
the engineering world and human
exploration world.
And then there was a world, there's a
world of, kind of, ideas and
and innovation and invention.
And then, so when I was
trying to figure out how to
bring these these two things that
seemed like separate things, at the time,
to me - this music and this engineering -
how to bring them together,
I felt very much that... I felt as a slave
to that way of thinking, like, okay, well,
where does this fit?
Because I had to write  an
application, I had to write a proposal to NASA
to propose why it was I wanted to go to
the (MIT) Media Lab
to try and figure out how to sonify
the Universe.
And so they asked me a question in the
application...
something like... I should go back and find
it, but it was something like... "Please describe your career up to
this point and how this
assignment will fit into NASA's
strategic goals."
And so I tried to... in answering this
question, I made this...
I realized, okay, well, I need to write a
Venn diagram because my career has been
like science and some engineering and
the overlap between science and
engineering, but then there was, like,
starting these global organizations with
the UN, and
the ideas and philosophy and so there's
going to be an ideas bubble...
And then I'm looking at it, and I realize,
okay, this is... I'm not really being honest
with myself. Instead of...
I realized this was the point where I
needed to be authentic and I had to
say... I needed to say what I thought was
true,
rather than what I thought they wanted
to hear. And I didn't think they wanted
to hear about art, but
I found the courage to put art into this
Venn diagram,
and when I did that I noticed literally
everything that I'd done
was... I could plot it in this Venn diagram
and I could
find... and most of the things were in
overlapping areas, but what I realized
was the juicy bit was right in the
middle. And I put the word
"goal!" This was a breakthrough for me!
just to think that it was possible to not
worry about which box it fit in, but to
use all of these different things
together. And,
if I were to be really authentic in that
Venn diagram, there would be the
spiritual bubble as well. And
that was what was so exciting to me
about Kepler. It was that...
that Venn diagram didn't exist in his
time. Science didn't even exist
he invented it! And he invented it
through music!
[MaryLiz] It's just... it's really fascinating!
So, okay, at this point you are so
inspired by Kepler, you've discovered your life mission.
It's coming to light, at least.
[Kelly] It's glimmering, yeah, just a little glimmer...
Yeah, I want to talk about the next step
that came to you,
and you have this analogy that you used
of "shaving a yak." Maybe that will help.
If you can kind explain...? The peer
pressure was high
at NASA not to think about things that
were, kind of,
already "solved." So, planetary dynamics is pretty much solved. Why would we want to
create
a sonified solar system? That
just sounds... I mean... that doesn't sound
like there's any...
any science there! That just sounds
like fun times.
Since the peer pressure was so high,
this was
looooow slow burn. This was like, try every so often to read Kepler's book, and
fail, and then put it back on the shelf.
And, but, like
think about it every night when going to
sleep, but just not actually doing
anything about it, for many years, for
decades, and
part of that was because, first of all, I
didn't really know even how to think or
talk about what it was that I wanted to
do!
I just wanted us to use music as as
science!
But that didn't exist, and the
technology, in fact, didn't even exist at
that point,
to do that. So, conceiving of what it was,
at all, took many, many years, and just
patience with the slow burn.  So, I
wrote that
proposal, I made that Venn diagram, NASA
accepted the proposal, and they sent me
to the MIT Media Lab. And that was where
I learned about this concept of yak
shaving.
So, yak shaving is: when you have a Thing -
we'll just call it "The Thing." It's a task
that you want to do or
something that is your goal. But in
order to do that thing,
you have to do this other thing. And the
other thing may or may not be directly
related, but it's in the critical path
of that Thing. But in order to do that thing, you have to do this other thing,
and in order to do that thing you have to do
this other thing. And sometimes there's a
chain
of things that you have to do that's so
long that by the time you get to the end of
it you're shaving a yak.
So, yak shaving is really a term for
really important things that kind of
have nothing to do with the main thing,
but
you have to do them to get to the main
thing.
And when I encountered this idea, it suddenly made me relax,
because it made me feel like, okay, first
of all, I don't know what thing is
but I know that it's there. But, what I
need to do is just learn how to
recognize the yaks when they come in
and also learn how to recognize other
hairy animals that aren't yaks
that are just going to distract me. And,
there were a lot of those hairy animals!  [MaryLiz] Mmm yes, it's hard...
I'm still working on
distinguishing between the two.
But, as I started shaving yaks, with the
specific
goal of figuring out what The Thing was,
then The Thing started coming to life.
So this was a...yeah...
this is a really important concept for me.
Yeah, so what was the first yak after
discovering that mission?
Where did you go?  Right! So, I went to the
Media Lab
and I was still a NASA employee, but I
was at the Media Lab as an "Innovation Ambassador" to try
and understand what made the place
innovative,
and then to bring that innovation back
to NASA. That was my goal. So
I basically had a chance to just spend
time learning stuff
and also doing some meta-analysis about
what caused innovation to happen.
And so the first thing I was really
focusing on while I was there were the
tools that would be required to do data
sonification,
because  knew that if I was going to want
to use sound and music
to represent data, I was going to need to
learn something besides FORTRAN77!
Because that was the only tool I had in
my box, at that point!  [MaryLiz] Wow!
So, at the Media Lab there was all sorts of
cool stuff, new stuff going on...
[MaryLiz ] They're still using FORTRAN!
They are, and I love it, but it doesn't
quite do all the jobs that are going to
be required to do this Thing.
So, I spent quite a bit of time just
learning new tools, learning new
programming languages, and
and then also just finding the
communities of people that were doing
these things.
And the data sonification community was
amazing! A lot of the yaks,
really, were focused in that time at the
Media Lab,
where I encountered people that were
doing really great data sonifications,
like my friend,
Joachim Gossman, made a beautiful
sonification and visualization that was
interactive of the Mandelbrot Set that
caused transformation in the way that I
understand fractals!
And this really excited me because
suddenly...
and it wasn't music, but it was sound, and I could use my ears
to understand math!  Like... WHOA...
that was so exciting! I was like, okay,  I
want to do this, but I want to do this
with the whole Universe!
So then the next yak was meeting Tarik
Barri,
who had built - this is before the days of
Unity and VR worlds -
but, he had created for himself a musical
instrument that was
in three dimensions that you would fly
through, these objects would
make sound, and as you place the objects
in space and then fly through them,
every time you fly through is a kind of
slightly different path, the music is
different. It's like a
three-dimensional interactive musical
instrument. And so,
it started just like these pieces just
started falling... okay,
so I want to do that but I
want
all that stuff you're flying
through to actually be data! [Mary Liz]
Cool, so here you are at the
Media Lab. You're immersing yourself in
this amazing community,
getting inspired by the other tools of
creation that they're using,
and then, somehow, you
end up working on these absolutely
beautiful
gloves that I've come to seriously know
and love. [Kelly giggles] Tell me about how you
you came to engineer the MI.MU Gloves.
[Kelly] Yeah, so this this is,
even still, one of my biggest yaks and my
favorite yaks. It's
super big and super hairy and I love it.
This this really is... the piece of
the puzzle for me with the
MI.MU Gloves
is if you're going to be immersed in
this data if you're going to be immersed
in a solar system that is
sonified where you could interact with
it and everything that you see and hear
is information, I want to
actually
have a way of interacting with that and
playing that like a musical instrument,
with my gesture. And so, for me,
the interactivity part of it was a big
piece of the puzzle.
And, while I was at the Media Lab I invited Imogen Heap to come and visit.
She came and visited, and
she got really inspired by my friend
Elly Jessop's
glove that she had created. And, just the
idea that you could take sound and then
manipulate it with your hands...that was
what she was looking for.
And she went back to the UK and
immediately started working on it!
And I went back to NASA.
But in the meantime, I'd gotten married and my husband
needed to go to the UK. It created an opportunity,
at Imogen's invitation, to come
and work on
new musical instruments with her and
work on the technology side
of what she was trying to do
in her studio which was really ambitious
yeah so how it came to be is that we
started trying to
use what was on the shelf to achieve
what she wanted to achieve and it just
didn't exist.
And we realized if we were going to
create a tool that would free her from her music technology and
allow her to do what she wanted to do
musically, we were going to have to
create it ourselves.
We learned very quickly that she wasn't
the only one that wanted this!
No, once she started talking about
what we were doing, everybody...
well...[not] everybody... LOTS of people wanted
this, for a lot of different things!
And we realized the universal appeal of
it. We weren't really doing anything "new,"
but after we created the gloves, we
realized, wow, we should try and make these
available to lots of people,
not just Imogen.
[MaryLiz] Thank-you! [Kelly laughs]
And it's really exciting. We've been doing that since, so
we've been working on it for 10 years
now.
And so they've gotten to the point where
people do have them in their hands -
- on their hands -
and, yes, it's really really exciting, we're
starting to do more things with them.
I know you've been
thinking about taking them to space!
[MaryLiz] What I love about what you all did is
that you made electronic music not
stiff and robotic but,
organic and human and when I think about
the International Space Station or
building new communities on other worlds,
I think, how can we make it beautiful?
How can we take our humanity with us?
Because that's what's important.
[MaryLiz continues] And so, I always saw these gloves as the perfect
tool for bringing our humanity to the
stars.
And, I know it's not just music we can
manipulate, it's
art, in many ways; it's sound; it's also
robotics that we can control; there's
beautiful science, like what you're doing.
So they are these lightweight perfect
tools of creation that I desperately
want to get into space.
But, as an outsider, from my perspective, I
just feel like you're
so purposeful in everything that you do,
from music-making
to the technology that you create.
It seems to me as I, kind of,
look at your whole mission,
that you're really concerned with the
evolution
of our species. And I feel that in one
regard
you're pushing us ahead with the
technology
that you create, and in another you're
helping us get back to the root of our
intuition if you will. Does that speak
to you? Do you feel like that
is accurate? [Kelly] That really resonates with me, yeah.
I often feel like i'm creating
a future that's a return to the past
when
music was a tool for exploring the
Universe. I really want to live in a
world where
where music is used that way; that we
don't just use it as a plaything.
But even more that it's part of a
broader capacity to immerse ourselves
in information about ourselves and about
our universe that will
help us understand who we are, help us
understand each other and connect to
each other,
help us to understand our oneness to
understand those things that are common
to all of
reality. Music and harmony, harmonics
and
energy and vibration are pretty much
at the heart of all physics and all
engineering,
and even all human experience.
And so a tool like this will, I really
hope,
help us underscore and understand
our oneness and experience it
very viscerally. And what really excites
me about Kepler's work is that he came
to the same conclusion.
At the end of his Harmonies of the World,
which is
where he laid out his [3 famous] laws of planetary
motion, he
essentially wrote a prayer
asking God to help us live in harmony
to mimic the harmony that was...
that defined
all of reality and to love each other
and to recognize our oneness.
That was super exciting to me, that a
scientist in 1619 would be writing that.
And, you know, it really
made me realize how much we've divorced
our science and our engineering from our
humanity.
And I think this is something I'd like
to help change.
 
you
