In August 2016, singer and composer Joi Barua had to fly to Singapore to showcase his song “Rabha,” a tribute to the Assamese polymath Kalaguru Bishu Prasad Rabha, where he came across a Singapore-based surgeon, Dr Susan Lim.
Eleven years on, the singer-composer from Jorhat is part of Dr Lim’s Cosmic Rhapsody, an orchestral and animated production linked to the science of NASA’s COSI space mission, with a Hollywood Bowl date set for July 2027. The path between the two points ran through a lunch table, a plush toy with a soul, a London recording studio and a cosmic tale coming to life.
A conversation over lunch
The song “Rabha” was a collaboration with American saxophonist George Brooks, lyricist Ibson Lal Baruah and animator Samudra Kajal Saikia. Since Lakshmi Pratury, the founder of INK, had introduced Joi to Brooks a year earlier in the United States, Joi felt inclined to go to Singapore to show what the collaboration had produced.
“I went to the INK conference as a mark of gratitude, to show that this beautiful song had been done and a beautiful video had been made,” the artist says during a conversation with EastMojo. “It was an act of gratitude that got me there.”
One of the invited speakers was Dr Lim, who had spent her career where medicine meets technology and is a pioneer of robotic surgery in Asia. Lim was drawn to the song and its accompanying video.
They stayed on for lunch, during which Susan described an idea she had been turning over: ALAN, a plush companion with a soul and a trace of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Her years beside surgical machines had left her with questions. “As technology evolves, what does companionship look like? Can an inanimate entity ever evoke genuine human empathy?” Susan says.
She asked Joi to put her lyrics about ALAN to music. “She asked if we could sit down on an idea she was developing and turn it around in music,” Joi recalls. “I found it to be the kind of challenge I was looking to engage myself with.” The stated goal then was Broadway.
The second Assamese voice
About a year later, at another INK conference, Joi introduced Susan to Samudra, whose animation had run on the screen behind “Rabha.” Samudra is an Assam-based poet, art historian and animator. Susan says his work does not merely accompany the music but interprets it.
“Joi and Samudra form the heartbeat of this project,” she says. “Assam has an ancient storytelling tradition rooted in folk lyricism and reverence for the natural world. That heritage lent an organic warmth to what could easily have felt like a sterile sci-fi setting.”
Joi traces that voice to the state’s artists. “Thankfully, we were born in the land of Bhupen Hazarika, Bishnu Prasad Rabha, Jyoti Prasad Agarwala, our brother Zubeen, who have been great voices of humanity,” the singer and composer says. “The challenges were huge, but I think being born in the sacred land has shown us what our Gurus (mentors) have done.”
The team grew. By 2018, when Joi and Susan met again, French composer Manu Martin had joined, along with Matthieu Eymard of France and Ron Danziger of Australia. The pandemic stalled the Broadway plan in 2020, so the group recast the musical for an animated film. The soundtrack to this animated film was an orchestral piece, LIM Fantasy of Companionship for Piano and Orchestra.
This became the first chapter of the LIM Trilogy. The result was LIM Fantasy of Companionship for Piano and Orchestra, recorded at Abbey Road Studios, London, which premiered at the Cadogan Hall in London in July 2023. Joi likened Susan’s effort to Noah’s ark: people from many places, bound for one destination.
Looking up
Cosmic Rhapsody is the second part of Susan’s LIM Trilogy, which was created with Dr Christina Teenz Tan and Martin as chief composer, orchestrator and arranger. ALAN becomes “ALANaut” and travels into space. There, it sees a supernova forge the elements of the periodic table, which fall back to Earth as cosmic confetti.
“If companionship can exist between humans and machines, what happens when that partnership journeys into space to seek answers for Earth’s ecological renewal?” Susan asks. The orchestral work had its world premiere at London’s Barbican Hall on May 5, 2025, with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the Royal Philharmonic under Robert Ziegler, and London Voices.
The NASA link came later. When the creators presented the story at the University of California, Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, astrophysicists saw a match with their COSI (Compton Spectrometer and Imager) mission. The COSI Mission, led by principal investigator John Tomsick, will read soft gamma rays to map where stars make the elements of life. Cosmic Rhapsody is not a NASA commission. It is an independent arts project with a scientific connection to the mission.
“The science mapped the stars; the music gave them breath,” Susan says.
Joi wrote the melodies for “Star Among the Cosmic Clouds” and “Confetti Storm” to Susan’s lyrics, and co-composed “Confetti Star-Ion” with Martin. The songs carry the story’s climax, a dying star scattering its elements across space.
He composed “Star Among the Cosmic Clouds” days after his father passed away. He was meant to be working on the song but had to go home to Jorhat due to the tragic incident.
“The science was Susan’s construct, but the story she was telling in the song was actually happening in my life. My father had merged with the cosmos. I could not access him physically, but I would look up for him in the sky in my mind. I would sit down in his office, at the table where he worked, and start composing,” Joi says.
That experience shaped his view of why the project works. “You talk about tomorrow in a research paper; it is a harder construct. You talk about tomorrow through a song, people tend to vibe with it,” he says.
The road ahead
A third instalment, Symphony of the Oceans, was announced in 2025 to address space debris and its impact on the oceans.
The next date is in California, where Cosmic Rhapsody will have its US premiere at the Hollywood Bowl on July 27, 2027, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Thibaudet. NASA is targeting August 2027 for COSI’s launch on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral.
Joi describes the effort as “an amalgamation of science and art that has kept the whole project together.”
“It’s not a problem of science or music anymore. It’s just a problem of whether we can be with each other to address a certain thing,” he says.
Meanwhile, Dr Lim shares, “Exploring the cosmic space through art is not about escaping Earth; it is about finding the perspective required to protect it. When we remember that we are literally made of stardust—chemically linked to the cosmos—the divide between ourselves and the universe fades. We are the universe made conscious, part of an unbroken cycle of life.”
Great oaks do grow from little acorns. This one started with a song about a legend from Assam and a lunch in Singapore.
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