It's Carl Sagan like you've never heard him: his digitized, remixed voice sounds more like something emanating from a radio tuned to a pop music station than from a TV playing a public television documentary. Footage of the scientist in his award-winning PBS series Cosmos mingles with stunning computer animations depicting complex scientific concepts. This is all part of a novel project called Symphony of Science, which is meant to bring science to the masses with the use of modern media. Nearly five million YouTube users have already tuned in to watch.
Symphony of Science was created in 2009 by John Boswell, a Washington-based electronic musician that specializes in audio remixing. Boswell was a sophomore at Western Washington University when he stumbled upon Sagan's Cosmos series late one night on the Discovery channel. "I immediately fell in love with the show, like so many people did," he told The Scientist.
As Boswell's interest in electronic music and composition grew throughout college, he started thinking of what he could do with the series. "Carl Sagan's voice lends itself perfectly to auto-mixing," Boswell said. "His voice is very mellow and consistent in tone, which means there are fewer adjustments that have to be made to the pitch levels."
When he graduated in 2008, Boswell started focusing more of his time on creating original electronic music. By the fall of 2009, inspired by compositions from The Gregory Brothers and DJ Steve Porter, he started remixing scientists, using the Cosmos series as the centerpiece of the audio and video.
He released his first piece, "A Glorious Dawn" featuring Sagan and Stephen Hawkins, in September of 2009. It has already been viewed nearly 3 million times on YouTube. Boswell then released "We Are All Connected" and "Our Places in the Cosmos" in October and November, respectively. The musician's latest video, "The Unbroken Thread," has received nearly 250,000 hits since it was released about a month ago.
For each song, Boswell combs through hundreds of science documentaries available on the web, pulling audio and visuals from conversations with scientists like Richard Dawkins, David Attenborough, and Jane Goodall. He then remixes the material using the software Reason 4.0 (instrumentals), Adobe Audition (audio editing), Melodyne (auto-tuning), and Sony Vegas (video editing). The musician doesn't own the rights to any of the material he uses, nor has he filed for permission to redistribute or alter it -- a fact that worried him tremendously when he received an email from Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan.
"I never expected anyone to watch the first video, so I didn't bother getting permission for the content," he said. "And then right off the bat I get an email from Ann. Luckily, she said she loved it, and that she thought Carl would have loved it. It was a very gracious first contact." No one else has come forward with any complaints, he added.
Boswell is currently taking a bit of a break from Symphony of Science, which is solely supported by donations, to work on other projects, but, he explained, he is "definitely going to keep going, and without a doubt, Carl will continue making appearances."
To watch all of the Symphony of Science videos, please click here.
Register for FREE Online Access
Subscribe to the Magazine