Musical Planets

The Houston Symphony recently commissioned a performance of Gustav Holst's "Planets" suite that was accompanied by images of the planets. Although it was not the first time visuals were added to this particular orchestral work, this production was an up-to-date version that used actual images gathered over time and many less than a year old. These images were all collected by the army of probes, orbiters, and rovers developed by NASA in recent years. The work has been titled "An HD Odyssey".

Duncan Copp, who created the imagery, has a doctorate in planetary geology and knew where to find the images and what sort of pictures were out there. Copp reviewed more than 10,000 images to create the film.

The concept is to create a synergy between the music and the pictures, to find a natural rhythm between the themes of each movement and the images. The images are designed to exude feelings of rationality and science. Many of them were collected from the Messenger spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and some from the Magellan spacecraft that date back to 1989.

It is an incredible concept and bridges emotions through imagery and music. To check out the "teaser" for The Planets, you can see their YouTube clip. The teaser begins roughly around 1:40.