My role in Sun Rings started early on, working alongside Terry in the pre-compositional part of the process. Back in 2001, Terry played me some initial demos of what he was writing for Kronos, along with a few of the audio recordings provided by Dr. Gurnett at NASA that had caught his ear. They were in their raw state: noisy, hissy, distorted audio collected by the Voyager satellite, then transposed up multiple octaves to be within the human range of hearing for analysis. Sometimes Terry selected source material based on its timbral quality, sometimes he was hearing a melodic line running within the broadband frequencies, like a single instrument within a wash of orchestral density. We carefully listened to these sounds together, with Terry communicating the specific elements that he was hearing or wished to focus on, as we exchanged ideas about what would be suitable to work with the string quartet.   Using these initial guidelines, I used forensic techniques to isolate sonically or artistically interesting audio material from the hours of audio recordings provided by NASA. Much in the way that sound designers for film create new sound worlds, I used extensive digital signal processing techniques to creatively manipulate the extracted audio, sculpting the fragments into cohesive and sonically rich musical material. Part of this process entailed building “instruments” from some of these abstracted sounds for Terry to compose with as part of the compositional process. While these were originally intended to allow Terry to play these sounds on the keyboard via samplers (and therefore compose for them), a few of the instruments, themselves made their way to the Sun Rings performance and are triggered by Kronos live using infra-red MIDI controllers, allowing them to play these sounds by waiving their hands in the reception field. (2020 GRAMMY award for Best Engineered Album, Classical)