To represent the concept that won the first poll, "I never wanted to die on earth", I chose to explicitly place the context in a non-Earth space through extended use of the whole-tone scale, which has no acoustically consonant intervals in it and causes listeners to feel unstable and without grounding; and then once we were firmly established as being in an inhospitable and unwelcome space, introduce an "Earth melody": A pleasing, familiar tune, and one that I felt represented triumph. The first 1:15 of the track is all whole-tone, and contains no recognizable chords or resolutions. But then at 1:16 enters the Earth melody: almost a banner-carrying melody that one might march to death with, a little bit of a Valhalla feel, which represents that the astronaut is consciously accepting this decision: they are owning their fate and they are ready to die in space. This is their home now, and they find it preferable to dying on Earth. The melody grows more and more triumphant, and overpowers the whole tone scale: we have a home and we suddenly belong here. At the end of the track you're hearing only whole-tone scale notes again, but you may no longer find them alien or strange; the Acceptance melody helped normalize them. From 2:10 onward you're actually hearing the same uncomfortable, formless notes as the first half of the song, but they make more sense to your ears now with the Earth centering. It's a cool effect.

Through the whole thing we've got the signature beeps and the heartbeat thumps. Nondeterministically, every couple bars, one of the beeps malfunctions and blows up the right speaker with a random glitch, which is fun.

The naming worked out really well for this. I was looking for something that was tied to a space concept, but also worked with this feeling of accepted death I was going for, which led me to burial at sea, in a sense; and, I never wanted to die on Earth anyway gave me the imagery of something that pulls you away from land. Plus, it's the moon that makes these, so...

I give you the track you all inspired me to make with your votes: "Tides".