The Interplanetary Collaborative Music Project (ICoMP) is an experiment in technical and creative collaboration. Participants in the project are working together under the simulated constraints of a human Mars mission to produce a body of work that brings together musicians and engineers from both on Earth and on Mars. The two-week ICoMP experiment is being conducted in the Mars Desert Research Station, a two-story simulated Mars Habitat located in the Utah desert. This area of Utah looks like the Mars of popular imagination with its red rock, huge buttes, and stratified cliffs. The landscape is remote and barren, and the habitat provides an environment for researchers to experience the isolation and other unique elements of living and working on Mars.

The MDRS is being crewed by scientists, engineers, and artists from around the world, representing groups like NASA, The European Space Agency, and numerous universities and private organizations. The ICoMP experiment will occur during Crew 6, the final crew for the 2002 field season. Crew 6 will occupy the research station from April 24th to May 8th.

Background

Three members of Crew 6 initiated the ICoMP experiment: Kelly Snook, Frank Schubert, and Sam Burbank. The remaining three members of Crew 6 are participating in various ways by writing poetry, lyrics, or contributing other creative ideas to the project.

NASA's current reference mission for a human Mars exploration calls for a two and a half year journey, with about 40% of the time in transit, and 60% spent on the surface of the planet. Because of the time delay between Mars and Earth, Mars explorers will be able to speak only with the other crew members. They may send video messages and e-mail to Earth, but always with a delay (from about 6 minutes up to 45 minutes round trip, depending on where Mars and Earth are relative to each other during their 780 day cycle). This type of limited communication means that the Mars crew will naturally become more autonomous than previous exploration crews in Earth orbit or on the Moon. A new paradigm of scientific, engineering, and creative collaboration must be pioneered to optimize the quality and effectiveness of input from Earth, while allowing the crew the flexibility to conduct operations as they see fit. Issues such as technical troubleshooting, both on Mars and on Earth, become much more difficult in this scenario. In collaborative situations, input from both sides might cross paths, or fail to reach the other side in time to produce desired results or prevent problems. Protocols and procedures must be developed to facilitate symbiotic relationships between Earth-bound and Mars researchers.

The issues of communications, protocols, and troubleshooting will be encountered for every kind of task performed on Mars. The ICoMP experiment was chosen to explore these issues in the context of a creative project for which success and failure could be easily defined and assessed. In the MDRS, ICoMP is treated as a scientific experiment. However, there are other interesting elements of the experiment that are relevant to long-duration spaceflight missions. Mars crews will get to know each other very well. They will have trained for years together on Earth, and we must assume they will be screened for compatibility as much as for their individual capabilities. But no matter what level of training, seeing the same faces and hearing the same voices day in and day out will sometimes be difficult. Within such a long a mission, crews will have down time. How will they occupy that time, find activities between the science and the constant work of exploration that encourage good physical and mental health? What can be done during those two and a half years to create an harmonious environment? Music may be one good solution.

Methodology

Crew 6 is collaborating with musicians from various locations on earth, each with markedly different technical recording and communication capabilities, and each with different creative strengths and talents.

A low-mass but high-performance recording infrastructure was required for deployment in the field (MDRS). The system had to fit on a desk and support multi-track recording and playback, and interface with the various instruments brought by the participants of the MDRS. This computer also had to be capable of communicating with the satellite dish on the MDRS and subsequently with the computers in studios on Earth.

A standard recording technique is being implemented. Most songs start with a rhythm track, then guitar and voice are added; then keyboards, bass, etc. When a song has been sufficiently developed, the component tracks are mixed down to a compressed stereo 10 to 1 audio file and transmitted to a server on Earth where the studios there can access it and add to the tracks as they see fit (violin, voice, drums, etc). When Earth studios have made their contribution, the files are sent back to the MDRS and where the collaboration continues. The fidelity of these tracks being passed back and forth between planets is relatively low, but they act as placeholders and allow the different participants to know what is being added to the songs. When crew 6 returns to Earth, the full resolution components from each song will be combined from the various studios into a final mix in one studio.

This process can occur in reverse as well, with Earth studios generating the initial work and transmitting that to Mars for embellishment.

The ICoMP team in the MDRS is running Protools recording software on a G4 powerbook (512 ram, 30 gig drive) with a Digi 001 breakout box routed through a Magma PCI to PCMCIA adapter. A variety of microphones are being used, with a Blue Dragonfly utilized for vocals and acoustic guitar and the pre-amp built into the 001. MDRS musicians brought two electric guitars, an acoustic guitar, an electric bass, a banjo, a flute, a weighted key electric piano (with a number of different sounds), many harmonicas (low mass), and some percussive instruments.

The communication system is a standard Starband dish communicating with a geosynchronous satellite. Upload speed is about as fast as a standard modem (5kbps), while the download speed is more like DSL (150kbps). One complication has been wind. Winds around the MDRS have reached 80 mph, and during those times it has been difficult to transmit files. Crews on Mars may experience similar troubles with communications depending on Mars weather conditions or communication satellite coverage.

The music files have been downlinked to Earth in one of two ways. One method has been to load the compressed rough mixes of ongoing work directly to an FTP site. All of the contributing studios and musicians have access to that server and can use the rough mixed songs in whatever kind of digital recording infrastructure they have.

The other method has been to upload entire work in progress ProTools recording sessions to a server provided by DidiDesign called DigiStudio. Files can be sent at 6 to 1 compression (very little sound degradation) and exactly the same session as is used by crew 6 becomes accessible by collaborators on Earth using ProTools. This method has higher fidelity and more flexibility for those receiving the work in progress, but requires particular software and high data transfer rates to be effective.

No final mixes will be done in the hab. The science room where the recording system is situated works well for recording separate takes, but doesn't offer the kind of sonic isolation needed to produce final songs. Once back on Earth, all of the files will be gathered to one studio and mixed.

Preliminary Observations

It was assumed that three of the crew members would create all the music in the hab, but as the simulation evolves, all of the crew members are interested in contributing to the project. The music has become one of the primary activities for most members. Those not playing or singing are writing lyrics and giving ideas for song structure.

The collaboration between MDRS members and people on Earth has also been interesting. The initial hypothesis was that this sort of collaboration might provide a feeling of expansiveness for participating crewmembers and have seen such a result now numerous times. They have friends they're working with outside of the spacecraft. This seems to be the case.

Additionally, some songs have originated on Earth, one from Submarine Studios in San Francisco (Joshua Burbank), and one from Mykle systems lab in Portland, OR (The Bad Mintons), and a third from Houston, Texas (Chelsea Beauchamp and Celeste Tamarriello). It's interesting to receive these more complete songs from so far away and allows a glimpse into what it's like for those on Earth receiving music from Mars; the musicians have put great effort into these pieces, and the impression is something like receiving a care package or of having visitors. When the music is shared, the hab feels bigger.

Initial observations by some of the participants in the MDRS crew is that this is a different dynamic from that sometimes experienced between exploration crews and mission support or science backrooms. Those interactions are sometimes tense and unproductive, and sometimes even acrimonious. Even within the MDRS simulation, there was a notable contrast between the nature and flavor of collaboration on ICoMP and the interactions between the MDRS crew and Mission Support on more general issues. Analysis of the ICoMP methods and data will assess the processes of collaboration that were successful and positive with the intention of applying this to future Mars mission tasks in general.