Professor Brian Cox has collaborated with PJ Harvey on music for his new live show

Professor Brian Cox has collaborated with with PJ Harvey on a new composition for Emergence, the celebrated physicist and stargazer’s anticipated new live show.

The new music from Cox and the twice Mercury Prize winning artist was recorded at Damien Quintard’s esteemed Miraval Studios in Provence, with a full orchestra, earlier in 2026. They collaborated on ‘Voyager’, which takes its name from from the NASA probes launched in 1977 to create something truly special. The probe contained the Voyager Golden Record which is still playing in space, and Harvey’s work consequently contemplates our own small and increasingly fragile place in the universe.

 “I was excited for the challenge to compose a song in the ‘voice’ of Voyager 2. I have long been fascinated by the spacecraft and its journey, and asked myself what it might say to us if it could? This was an inspiring route to take to develop the song,” Harvey told Rolling Stone UK.

“The song had already started life as part of the ongoing work towards my new album, so when Professor Brian Cox invited me to write a piece for his new show, I sent him the voice memo of this song to see if it resonated. It immediately made him think of the Voyager craft and the sound of its signal being sent back to Earth. With these ideas as my starting point I let the song develop, and discussed an orchestral accompaniment with Dario Marianelli.”

She added: “I’m very happy with the end result, and it’s wonderful to hear the orchestral score bring such expansiveness to my music. I thoroughly enjoyed researching the history and journey of Voyager 1 & 2, and was glad to be able to quote the great Carl Sagan within the song, and his famous description of our fragile and beautiful ‘pale blue dot’.”

A behind the scenes video, which you can watch exclusively below, also sees Brian and Academy Award-winning composer Dario Marianelli discussing the making of other music in Brian’s show, including Dario’s piece ‘Kepler’s Snowflake’. That piece was inspired by the German polymath who famously noticed a snowflake land on his arm in the winter of 1610, before using it to contemplate the complex design of the universe.

“I’ve loved creating Emergence – it’s the most ambitious live show I’ve ever written. I’ve been very lucky to collaborate with a wonderful group of scientists, musicians, filmmakers and graphic artists to bring cosmology, biology, philosophy and history to the largest and most advanced LED screens available, with the best sound and lights I could find,” he said.

“I hope the show is an all-encompassing experience, and I hope it leaves everyone, whether they love science or music or history, or simply contemplating the beauty of Nature, with something new to think about.” 

Check out our full Q&A with Brian Cox below.

What does music add to a show about space, science and cosmology?

Astronomy and Cosmology are both intellectually and emotionally challenging sciences. We have discovered that we live on one small planet orbiting around one star amongst 400 billion, in one galaxy amongst two trillion, in a small patch of a possibility infinite Universe. We have discovered that we are collections of atoms in temporary patterns that can think and in doing so bring meaning to an otherwise meaningless Universe, if only for the blink of an eye in cosmic time. What should we feel about that? Science doesn’t give you any guidance at all! That’s where music comes in. Music is one of the ways we’ve developed to explore the emotional landscape of reality rather than the physical landscape. It is complementary to the science, providing a different and necessary perspective on our place in the Universe. 

Why were PJ Harvey and Dario Marianelli the right people to collaborate with on the music for your new tour show?

PJ Harvey and Dario Marianelli combine a deep love and knowledge of science with musical boldness, ambition and eloquence. When we chatted about the project I immediately recognised that all three of us see music as a way of exploring the unanswerable questions raised by cosmology. Music is part of an intellectual and emotional conversation with the science – certainly not a sort of backdrop for images and ideas which it so often becomes in these collaborations. If you listen to Voyager or Kepler’s Snowflake in the live show, you experience something that is most definitely more than the sum of its parts. That’s what these two musicians bring to the table. Music as part of an intellectual exploration of what it all means! 

In devising your current show, did you end up more or less hopeful that humans will figure out how to navigate the challenges we face? 

You may be surprised to learn, given the current political and international backdrop, that I emerged from writing Emergence with an optimistic view of our future. As I say in the show, modern science is really only 4 centuries old, and during those 400 years we’ve been through multiple crises which at times must have seemed to be existential. But we made it through, and we now have the Voyagers heading outwards to the stars. The challenge we face as scientists is to explain to people just how fortunate we are to be here, how rare and precious we may be, and what a wonderful future we have if we embrace the values of the enlightenment discovered by Kepler and Galileo and their fellow explorers at the beginnings of modern science. That is the message of the show, and that message is greatly enhanced in emotional and intellectual power by Dario and Polly’s music. 

Professor Brian Cox’s Emergence Tour kicks off in Edinburgh next month. Buy your tickets here.