Journey composer Austin Wintory wants to give you an emotional connection to science

Austin Wintory composed the music for Journey, Abzu, The Banner Saga games and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, among many other credits to his name. His new project has a simple, but challenging, goal: to help others have an emotional reaction to science.

A Light in the Void will be a show with original music, presentations given by scientists live on stage, and documentary and animated footage. Wintory and his partner, Emmy-nominated filmmaker Tony Lund, are currently raising the funds for the first live performance and stream of the experience in Denver with the Colorado Symphony. The campaign has raised $72,000 of its $80,000 goal, with seven days to go at the time of this writing.

It’s an ambitious undertaking. Three scientists will be presenting their own speeches, with each one trying to tackle huge questions: Where did we come from? Who are we? And where are we going?

These speeches will be performed live by the scientists who wrote the words, accompanied by Wintory’s original score, also performed live. Imagine a TED talk with live orchestration, set to music written specifically to heighten the emotional impact of the information being shared with the audience.

The idea for the show was developed over a number of years, but Wintory was given a boost from Neil deGrasse Tyson, who had narrated a video about the Curiosity Mars Rover that was co-directed and scored by Wintory. While Tyson couldn’t participate in the Light in the Void experience due to an already-packed schedule, he was gracious enough to open his list of contacts to the project to find the right participants.

“Casting” the right scientists wasn’t an easy job: They were looking for individuals who could share specialized knowledge with the audience while also performing live against an orchestrated score.

“This requires a level of choreography that’s so perfect, to ask a scientist, a non-theater actor, to step into that role certainly comes with a certain trepidation,” Wintory told Polygon. “But at the same time they’re all game for it, they all understand and they’re all like ‘let’s do it!’”

And that level of performance and cohesion between all the different parts of the show will be important if the experience is to fulfill its promise. “It’s not a show about vomiting facts,” Wintory explained. “This is a show about communicating emotions.”

It’s a practical way to approach getting people excited about science. Wintory realized that so much bad information was often passed around social media because of the emotional impact it had. Stories that make people feel something, even if they weren’t based on anything, were much more likely to become popular online. So why not create something that stirred emotion in the audience that wouldn’t be proven wrong by further research, but would instead be heightened by it?

“For me it’s the raw joy that comes with discovery, and indulging your curiosity,” Wintory said. “That feeling is addicting.” Science can deliver the same feeling of daring, boldness and even fear as great theater, he points out, but the general public rarely gets a chance to experience that side of scientific discovery.

A Light in the Void is being created, in part, as a tribute to Wintory’s father. “My life-long love of science came from him,” Wintory said. He remembers his father giving him an explanation of the big bang theory when Wintory was a child, and then wondering what came before that. His father told him, with enthusiasm, that no one knows.

“The mystery itself was thrilling to him,” Wintory explained. “Like a giant cosmic detective novel. So many of us come to associate ignorance with shame. He saw ignorance as empowering discovery, as emboldening our curiosity.”

A Light in the Void is trying to pass that same feeling to as many people as possible.