In his studio near a picturesque village in Québec, Daniel Toussaint turns to his full orchestra — a Power Mac G5 and his keyboard — to compose and edit music and design sound for “Miracle Planet,” a five-part documentary series charting the birth of life on earth.

Narrated by Christopher Plummer and produced by the Discovery Channel, “Miracle Planet” weaves Toussaint’s score as it highlights the cataclysmic events, false starts and cosmic coincidences that punctuate the earth’s four-billion-year journey.

Toussaint’s challenge: shift between location footage from around the world, interviews with leading scientists, cutting-edge computer graphics — and complete the work for all five episodes in two months.

“It’s a good thing I had the G5 and Logic,” Toussaint says. “It was rocking.”

“With the Mac, you experience the music as you’re composing it rather than hearing it in your mind and playing it later — or waiting to assemble an orchestra.”

The Mac as Pen

“The production team was amazed by the quality of the sound,” says Toussaint, who has created award-winning electro-acoustic music and solo piano pieces for theater and cinema since he was a teenager.

Toussaint composed and sound designed the five episodes of “Miracle Planet” with Logic Pro 7 and plug-ins such as Sculpture, EXS24 and Space Designer. He mixed the final edit on Pro Tools to prepare the tracks for the final mix — in Icon on a Power Mac G5 at the National Film Board in Montreal. And during the mix, he set up an iBook to monitor the tracks (see sidebar).

Toussaint readily confesses that he’s “not a computer guy. But the Mac is like my pen. It lets me spend more time making music than making paperwork.”

Arpeggios at Five

In a way, Toussaint has been preparing for “Miracle Planet” since he was a five-year-old child inventing sound effects on the piano. “It wasn’t that I was playing nice melodies,” Toussaint remembers. “I’d pretend I was an astronaut and play low notes for the rumble of a rocket. Or if I was pretending to ride a horse, I played arpeggios.”

Toussaint never stopped experimenting with music. Influenced by the electro-acoustic music of Pierre Henry and Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 50s and 60s, he began composing his own works as a teenager. From the time he entered the Conservatory de musique de Québec, Toussaint began creating electro-acoustic music for Canadian theater and films.

Epic Score

”Miracle Planet” opens, appropriately, with an epic-scale score that reflects the asteroid collisions and cataclysmic events that led to earth’s creation. “It’s a big score,” says Toussaint. “It begins chaotically and then becomes rhythmic — the same way the universe began — constantly shifting and changing. There’s chaos, then order — and hope as life begins.”

Working in Logic Pro 7 on his Mac, Toussaint drew from sample libraries such as the Vienna Symphonic and the Miroslav Vitous. “Miroslav Vitous is an older library, but I still use it because it was the first to record musicians playing with emotion,” he says. “You hear the vibrato in the flute and oboe. It’s not static.”

The new Pro edition of the Vienna Library, Toussaint adds, “allows you to play realisitic legato and is amazingly well done. When you have classical training, the Vienna library is a gift of God.”

Toussaint also scored delicate, ephemeral pieces for segments of the series that point to life’s fragility. He calls one piece “Evidence of Life.” It’s about the discovery of the earth’s earliest life forms found miles underground today. These microbes still exist in a kind of suspended animation, untouched by catastrophic events that occurred on the earth’s surface billions of years ago.

Next page: Evidence of Life