Biotech’s
First Musical Instrument Plays Proteins Like Piano Keys
A biophysicist and composer have banded together to create a
music box that turns biology into sound
Image: Karen Ingram
(kareningram.com
First comes a cacophony of gongs, then flutters of chimes, then
a deep melodic whale call—these are the sounds of the first musical instrument
powered by biotechnology. The music comes from a black box in the home lab of
Josiah Zayner, a biophysicist at the University
of Chicago . Inside the
box blue lights pulse on vials of proteins, which in turn trigger the sounds.
Zayner calls it the chromochord. “Chromo” refers to the colored lights and
“chord” refers to the strings of a musical instrument. Essentially, it’s light
activated. “Scientists see beauty in a well-crafted experiment,” Zayner says.
“The chromochord allows other kinds of people to experience that beauty.”
The chromochord
relies on proteins fromplants that
respond to sunlight, known as light-, oxygen- and voltage-sensing (LOV)
proteins. Sunlight causes proteins in leaves and stems to expand, which sets
off a cascade of cellular signals that allows plants to grow toward a light
source. Zayner isolated LOV proteins from oats, collected them in vials and
bioengineered each sample to react differently to blue light. “People don’t
have the chance to consciously experience life on the cellular level,” says
Zayner, who studies LOV protein activation and movement in his research. “This
brings it smack-dab in their ears.”
The chromochord holds 12 vials, each paired with a different
sound. When light shines on one vial the proteins inside swell, changing the
wavelength they absorb. A sensor measures the change in absorption and cues the
sounds. As one set of proteins slowly expands, the chromochord emits the deep
thrum of a bass; as another setquickly shrinks, out comes the sound of glass
chimes.
“There is something
conceptually appealing about hearing the sounds of biological things,” says
Jason Freeman, interim director of the Center for Music Technology at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. “These proteins have their own music to them.
People make music out of mold, nanoparticles or all kinds of things. There’s something
intrinsically interesting about these projects because they’re seeking to make
audible that which is normally inaudible to us, to reveal something that may be
a little bit mysterious or invisible to us in nature.”
The first chromochord prototype had a push-button interface but
Zayner found it unwieldy and finicky when he first played it at a physics
conference in Berlin .
Instead, he wanted to create a more portable and reliable device, so he
partnered with composer Francisco Castillo Trigueros on a second version. The
two met after Zayner sent a mass e-mail to composers at the local conservatory.
“Francisco was the only one who responded,” Zayner says. Trigueros wrote the
music and Zayner translated it into automated light pulses and built the
machine.
The two make a surprising pair: Zayner has a lip piercing and a
large cross tattoo on his chest, whereas Trigueros wears V-neck sweaters and
collared shirts and is often mistaken for the scientist.
In May the collaborators had their first two-day musical installation
at the University
of Chicago . The room was
dark and the sounds were eerily calming. On the front wall projections of
deep-blue blobs morphed into one another, a visual representation of the
sounds. But on the second day of the show the proteins began to stick together.
The musical phrases turned into noise and the visuals faded. “The installation
that we set up had beautiful music,” says Zayner, “but then over time the
music would slowly be distorted as the proteins started to fail.”
The breakdown surprised Trigueros: “I
had to rethink my role as a musician.” But it was Zayner’s intention. “In our
bodies, there might be a million proteins in a cell. Some of them get
damaged—things happen,” Zayner says. “In the end it’s not perfect, but it’s still
beautiful almost because of that imperfection.”
Others seem to have agreed. “I think
the audience was pretty enamored with it,” says Julie Marie Lemon, the program
director and curator of the Arts|Science Initiative at the University of Chicago .
“In a sense, the life of the protein was being experienced.”
Zayner and Trigueros next plan to
create another musical instrument, this time using cells and sound, rather than
light to stimulate them. They hope to expose bacterial and one day human cells
to music and measure how the cells’ pressure-sensitive ion channels respond.
When sound waves hit the channels, a surplus of ions floods through the cell
and elicits a response that can be translated into new, different music. “This
is just the seed, and we will see how the tree grows, but it could be really
strange,” Trigueros says.
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