Kelly Snook

By John Owen

Kelly Snook has two great fascinations: space and music. An aerospace engineer and planetary scientist for NASA by day, she is using knowledge she learned through Berkleemusic to launch a second career as a music producer and Pro Tools specialist. Thanks to this interest, she has recorded sound with director James Cameron, is currently working with Moby, and even managed to complete a Berkleemusic course while on assignment in Bolivia.

“Both my parents were professional musicians when I was growing up,” says Snook. “My father is a singer songwriter, my mother was a violin teacher, and my grandmother was a musician too. We all played in the orchestra together. I started learning piano when I was two or three, I did Suzuki violin when I was three, and played cello, bassoon, baritone, oboe and percussion in the marching band. In fact, my dream when I was young was to play oboe in the Boston Pops.”

Snook instead chose to pursue her interest in science, but she always felt like there was a piece missing in her life. One day, she recalls, “I went into West LA Music and said, ‘give me the best producing rig you have in the store. I don't want to run into any limitations.’” She walked out with a $30,000 Pro Tools Mix3 setup. “And then,” she says, “I got it all home and realized I had not the first idea of how to operate it.”

Although Snook read the manuals and took an introductory course in Pro Tools, she wasn’t making the most of her new studio. When she saw an ad for Berkleemusic’s music production certificate programs, she knew it would be time well spent. After doing some research on which program would best suit her, she signed up for Berkleemusic’s Master Certificate Program in Music Production and Technology.

One thing that has struck her about Berkleemusic’s approach, Snook says, is “the way the courses are presented. You can tell there's been an enormous amount of work that has gone into the creation of these materials. I've tried creating curricula in the past, so I know what goes into it. I also know how much time it must take on the part of the professors.”

In her opinion, the instructors and the diversity of the students is what sets Berkleemusic apart. “I think the thing that has been most valuable for me in these classes has been the feedback from the professor on the work that I and other students have done,” she remarks. “The ability to see other people's work and then see the professor's feedback is where I really learned the most. It's like ten people doing your homework.”

When asked how she feels about her Berkleemusic experience so far, Snook enthuses, “I have loved everything! I've been really surprised at the depth of the coursework and the effectiveness of the teaching, by how ideas that you'd imagine need to be taught live can be conveyed in a distance course. I was really just pleasantly surprised.”

As for what she feels she’s getting out of the program, Snook said, “I look at it exactly the same way I look at investment in world travel or scientific experiments - you don't know exactly what you're going to discover, but you're absolutely sure that you want to discover it. It's an investment in what you don't know you don't know. And just like in science, the more you know about music, the more you realize you don't know. The whole process is irresistible.”

With a few courses toward her certificate under her belt, Snook is beginning to combine her space and music careers. Currently she is working with Moby to create an enormous art and music installation near the site of the future spaceport that Virgin Galactic honcho Richard Branson is building outside Houston. “Music production lights me up like nothing else in the world,” she says. “The professional benefits of simply doing it, as opposed to sitting at my desk at NASA and just dreaming about doing it, are already immeasurable, but adding to that the systematic knowledge and training of the Berkleemusic coursework is light upon light.”