Kelly Snook
Dr. Kelly Snook is Imogen’s studio and technology manager. She is embarking on a new career, joining Team Heap via a circuitous route that included a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University, an 18-year career as a NASA Researcher and manager, and a Master’s Certificate (almost) in Music Production from Berklee School of Music (online). One aspect of her work at NASA took her all over the world to extreme environments such as the mid-ocean ridges, the high arctic, and the deserts of Chile and the American Southwest,where she helped NASA prepare for human scientific exploration of the Moon and Mars. Kelly (only half-)jokes that, naturally, being a NASA Scientist also prepared her towork with Imogen Heap.
Daughter of electronic music pioneer, Carl Fravel (gentleelectric.com) and musician herself since age 3, Kelly is keen to combine her general interests in music, technology, science, and engineering with her passion for making things. Her central arena is audio, and she has operated her own recording studio since 2001, called It’s Not Rocket Science Studios , recording and producing independent artists. What attracted her to this project was the opportunity to take part in developing new modes of interactive musical expression while helping Imogen, who is known for pushing the envelope in this area, both in composition and performance.Kelly is the connecting point for Imogen between all the team members’ work and has been involved in the design and development of the overall glove system architecture, systems engineering/technical management, programming, and audio engineering roles. She worked closely with Imogen and the team on glove system requirements definition, integration and testing. For this second iteration of the gloves design, she worked with Adam Stark to design and build the Max MSP interface for mapping gestures to midi messages. She is also responsible for the audio engineering design and implementation for the gloves, working behind the scenes to ensure that everything sounds the way it should.
She is thrilled about the hard work conducted to bring the gloves to where they are now through a sinuous and iterative design process with a group of outstanding and talented people and looks forward to bring her skill set to further the potential of the invention.