Joi Barua has taken Assam’s music into a new international arena with Cosmic Rhapsody, a multimedia project connecting performing arts with NASA’s COSI space mission.
The Assam-born singer and composer has created melodies for two songs in the production and co-composed another with French composer Manu Martin. The project has now drawn attention for its connection to NASA’s research into exploding stars and the creation of elements in the universe.
Joi Barua joins Cosmic Rhapsody
Joi Barua composed the melodies for “Star Among the Cosmic Clouds” and “Confetti Storm”. He also co-composed “Confetti Star-Ion” with Martin, who serves as chief composer, orchestrator and arranger for the larger orchestral work.
Created by Dr Susan Lim and Dr Christina Teenz Tan, Cosmic Rhapsody combines live orchestral music, pop songs, animation and storytelling. Its fictional story follows a human and an AI travelling into space while searching for answers to Earth’s environmental challenges.
The project gives Barua a prominent role in an international production that brings science and music together on stage.
Who is Dr Susan Lim?
Dr Susan Lim is a Singaporean surgeon, scientist and entrepreneur who has worked across medicine, transplantation research and robotic surgery.
She performed Singapore’s first successful liver transplant in 1990 and later became involved in robotic general surgery. She also holds a PhD in transplantation immunology from the University of Cambridge.
Lim and Tan created Cosmic Rhapsody as a project built around storytelling and songwriting. Their work brought together composers, performers and visual artists for a production centred on humanity’s relationship with the cosmos.
For Barua, the collaboration with Lim is not entirely new. Their earlier work included “Is Anybody Out There?”, a song Lim wrote following the 2020 return of NASA astronauts aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission. Barua composed the music for that song.
How Joi Barua reached NASA’s COSI mission
The NASA connection became clear when Lim and Tan visited the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where COSI is being developed.
COSI stands for Compton Spectrometer and Imager. Led by principal investigator John Tomsick, the mission will study soft gamma rays from cosmic sources and investigate how elements are produced in violent stellar events such as supernovae.
That research closely matches the themes running through Cosmic Rhapsody. Barua’s songs focus on stars, explosions and the material scattered across space after a star dies.
As a result, music created for the stage found an unexpected connection with an actual space-science mission.
Assam gets another creative link
Joi Barua is not the only Assamese artist involved in the project. Animator and director Samudra Kajal Saikia, also from Assam, is contributing to the visual side of Cosmic Rhapsody.
Saikia’s involvement gives the project a second direct link to Assam. While Barua’s melodies interpret cosmic events through music, Saikia works with animation to build the project’s visual world.
Barua has previously worked as a playback singer, vocal arranger, background singer and composer. His film-related credits include Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, DevD, Agent Vinod, Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. and Lage Raho Munna Bhai. He also sang the radio version of “O Meri Laila” from Laila Majnu.
Joi Barua heads towards a major 2027 milestone
The next major stage for Cosmic Rhapsody is already set. The project is scheduled to make its US premiere at the Hollywood Bowl on July 27, 2027, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
NASA’s COSI mission is also scheduled for an orbital launch from Cape Canaveral.
For Joi Barua, the project brings together several strands of his career while placing his music inside an international production inspired by space science.
The NASA connection does not mean Barua’s songs are part of the scientific mission itself. Instead, his music belongs to Cosmic Rhapsody, a creative project whose themes closely intersect with the questions COSI aims to investigate.
From Assam to an international stage, Barua’s latest collaboration has given his music a distinctly cosmic setting.