We had a wonderful evening of music and astronomy this Saturday up at Abriachan Forest.

The evening began with a unique premier – a live analogue synthesiser set from Nick Scroggie and Maarten De Vries of QRM, riffing beautiful melodies, sounds and effects in realtime against a montage of space and astronomy themed visuals I’d created for the evening.

Afterwards we had a virtual planetarium tour and talk on Supernovae, before finally getting some breaks in the cloud and heading out to see Jupiter and several nearby constellations and bright stars.

The development of the musical and visual concept is worth mentioning. Maarten and I discussed the idea of bringing astronomy visuals together with drone music about a year ago, but various other commitments got in the way of execution until earlier this year when Maarten and Nick agreed to test out the concept at Abriachan.

I developed a rough chapter outline for the visuals based on a journey of increasing scale through the universe. Beginning on Earth, then moving past our solar system into the distant stars, before finally arriving at the grandest realm of all – the galaxies. I sourced hundreds of images and video clips from NASA and other space agencies, downloading the highest resolution renders I could find.

During the visual editing process I used one of QRM’s ‘Drone Day’ sets for musical inspiration, timing the fades, pans and transitions to match the general pacing and atmosphere of the music. After a first draft I handed the visuals over to Nick and Maarten who then used it to develop some very rough musical concepts, split into acts to match the visual chapters .

It should be stressed that Maarten and Nick’s music was not in any way pre-recorded. The whole performance was live, with melodies, drums and base lines setup and generated on the fly via analogue synthesisers as they watched the visual footage. The only samples used were some spot effects Nick either recorded locally or sourced from BBC repositories.

I’ve put together footage of the event on Youtube and embedded it above for your enjoyment. Feedback from the audience was incredibly positive and we have tentative plans to deliver something similar in the future..

The next Star Stories event will be mid December. Look out for details appearing soon.