Space Shuttle Challenger Tribute Created with Korg Kronos

[Redhotpoker]

I had completely forgotten the date.

 

 

http://www.keyboardmag.com/article/space-shuttle-challenger/January-2011/126613

 

" KARMA Developer Stephen Kay, working with the new Korg KRONOS, has released an inspirational and heart-felt tribute song/video to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster which occurs this Friday, January 28, 2011.

 

 

Accompanied by his long-time partner David Alvey on guitars and backing vocals, Kay used the new Korg KRONOS to record all of the keyboard, synth and drum parts for the resurrection of his 25 year old original composition "The Challenger (Where No One's Gone Before)".

 

"25 years ago, right after the event when I wrote and recorded a version of this song, the Internet was nothing like it is now," comments Kay. "There was no YouTube, no Facebook or Twitter - no social networking sites and

forums to release this on myself. While I received some great responses and positive interest, I was unsuccessful in getting it released back then."

 

In early 2010 Kay, now the developer of KARMA Technology at Karma-Lab and a partner with Korg and Yamaha, discovered that the 25th anniversary of the disaster was approaching, so he re-visited his effort and realized that perhaps the song might finally be able to find an appreciative audience.

 

Kay found a challenge of his own in resurrecting the song: the tracks and the equipment used to play them were now decades old, and it would be difficult to restore them, particularly as the original master tape was

decomposing and decaying. He could have re-recorded the song anew, though it had been years since he had regularly performed, but he felt the emotion held in his original performance would be more appropriate and vital. He found help restoring the tapes into new digital files, and brought his old equipment out of storage, including his now 30-year-old Apple II+ computer, which he successfully nursed back into working order.

 

The story of this process, which he figures may be of most interest to "musicians and recording geeks," is related on his site, ChallengerTributeSong.com, with great care and comprehensive detail, along with the history of the Challenger mission, the astronauts, and other resources related to the production of the song and video.

 

http://www.ChallengerTributeSong.com

 

In all, the project took some six months to complete. Not wishing to gain from this financially, he hopes that it will encourage donations to the Challenger Center for Space Science Education, founded by Challenger family members, www.challenger.org.

And he merely wishes to once again take the chance to convey the heartfelt message of hope and inspiration to all who would challenge the odds, and to remind the world that "It's with the brave that the future lies."

 

 

 

Chas

[Gribs]

That is a wonderful song. I was a junior EE student at SUNY Buffalo when the explosion happened and saw the footage on my resident adviser's TV as I passed by her room on my way back from class to have some lunch in my room. It is one of those moments that one always remembers. As an engineering student and blossoming computational scientist, I was really into the idea of the space program and shuttle missions. I was very upset about the deaths of the astronauts and also what I projected would be a disastrous blow to public opinion of the space program. Also Gregory Jarvis was celebrated as a graduate of the SUNY Buffalo engineering program. After the disaster we petitioned successfully to have one of the engineering buildings renamed after him (it had just been named something like "Engineering West" before that).

 

My first job at 3M was with a little-known national lab that was administered by 3M under contract for the US government (like the way Cal Tech administers the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) called "National Media Laboratory". One area of specialty for the lab, though not mine, was archiving and restoring magnetic tape recordings. I am not sure if that group is around anymore either at 3M, Imation, or someplace else, but there are certainly people who are experts at restoring old magnetic recordings of audio, video, and data. While I was there, some people with security clearances and expertise were called upon to restore data tape from a damaged black box from a crashed military jet, and a very good friend of mine who still works at 3M in my current lab did research and wrote a scientific paper on diffusion of water into reels magnetic tape in order to help predict how long a data tape, eg in a black box that crashed into the ocean, could survive immersed. The point is that there are people out there who specialize in data recovery from damaged tapes (and hard drives too). It turns out that magnetic tapes don't last very long. The biggest problem AFAIK is that the binders for the magnetic coatings get gooey (at least with respect to some time scale) and adjacent layers in a wound-up reel ooze into each other over time. At some point the layers can get so gummed up that there is not much that can be done - the reel turns into a hockey puck. One way to help prolong the lifetime of a tape recording considerably is to just fast-forward and rewind it once per year to make sure that the layers get well-separated from each other.

[Redhotpoker]

It was one of those rare moments in our life times that gets forever etched into ones unconscious mind.

Of course American President John Fitzgerald Kennedy's murder when I was but 10, and 911 are in that vaccuum chamber too.

 

It's interesting reading your thoughts and memories of that horrible day in manned space flight history.

You seem to be one of the more down to earth, intelligent deep thinkers on this whole Forum, I've witnessed..

It's a pleasure reading them 'brain waves', quite often.

 

Our future generations will surely benefit from those deaths.

The lost school teacher, her death really affected me:

 

http://space.about.com/cs/deceasedastronaut/a/mcauliffe.htm

 

Chas