Hello there. I hope that wherever you are, that you are staying well and that 2021 is already being a much kinder year to you than 2020 was.

My name is Ryan O'Neill and I make music under the name Sleeping at Last. And this is the Sleeping at Last Podcast, where I have the absolute privilege of getting to share with you how my music gets made.

So today is going to be a very teeny tiny little episode about a brand new piece of music that I just wrote and just released from my astronomy series of songs.

And for those of you that may not be familiar, astronomy is an ongoing series of mostly instrumental music, which I'm writing inspired by current astronomical events and discoveries.

And so I write these pieces of music as scores of sorts, kind of imagining what the what the soundtrack would sound like for cool stuff happening in the universe around us.

And speaking of super cool stuff happening in space, later today, February 18th, NASA JPL's Perseverance Rover will actually blaze through the red planets atmosphere and land on Mars.

And this happens around 355 p.m. Eastern time. And I think it's really, really super exciting. So I wrote a little piece of music for the occasion.

So before we dive in and I get to share with you the details of what went into to making this piece of music, let's go ahead and listen to it.

So here's my song, February 18th, 2021 Perseverance Mars Landing.

Okay.

So first of all, thank you so much for

listening to the song. It means a lot to me to get to share this with you. I'm always a mixture of terrified and just elated to get to share the things that I'm making with you. So number one, thank you for listening to the song, which I think you might have heard for the first time right now. And number two, for being curious about what goes into making the music that I make. So thank you. You are awesome. And I really appreciate you. So NASA launched the perseverance on July 30th last year 2020.

And it's landing today, February 18th, 2021. And so that means it took 203 days exactly from the launch from Earth to the landing on Mars. And I knew that I wanted to somehow reflect that in this piece of music. Obviously I didn't want to write a 203 day piece of music. So I chose to make the exact length of the song, 203 seconds.

Although this piece of music is inspired by the landing on Mars, I wanted to somehow nod to the launch. And so at the beginning of the song, you'll hear the actual launch audio from perseverance, which is the deep rumbling kind of explosive sound.

And the beginning of the song is meant to sort of somehow sound like perseverance entering Mars atmosphere. So it's kind of loud. It's the loudest peak of the song. And it's distorted and kind of has that crunch to it.

And after it's big and loud, I wanted it to feel like the actual touchdown. And so there's just a single piano representing the rover essentially landing and waking up.

And so that's what I wanted to do.

And so that's what I wanted to do.

Of course, adding in quite a bit of human emotion, I wanted the piano in general and the shape of the song going forward to sound like wonder. This incredible piece of machinery is there for the sake of our exploration and for the sake of wonder. And so I wanted that to come through in the piece of music.

Perseverance is out there with with four goals and four objectives. Number one, determine if Mars ever supported life. Number two, understand the process and history of climate on Mars.

Number three, understand the origin and evolution of Mars as a geologic system. And number four, to prepare for human exploration.

I just want to take a side moment to say how cool it is that we are living in a time when we're sending machines to other planets and for the sole purpose of exploration and wonder and that last bit about preparing for human exploration.

...