Science finds its song
Geoscientist Hiroto Nagai composed music about Earth’s climate system using meteorological data from the polar regions.Credit: K. R. AraragiWhen Colin Campbell stood before colleagues at a chemistry-department gathering last February at the University of Edinburgh, UK, it wasn’t to talk science. It was to play science. On his bagpipes. With the tune crafted from the molecular structure of NANOG, the only protein with a name derived from Celtic mythology.Campbell, a spectroscopist, and a bagpiper in a community band, had started experimenting with translating scientific data into music years earlier — assigning RNA sequences to musical notes and converting spectral lines into melody. What began as a side project to merge his two passions, music and science, soon became a communal enterprise. While on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2018, he formed a band with colleagues — the Rocky Canyon and the Flatiron Five — to perform data-driven compositions.Sounds of science: how music at work can fine-tune your researchOnce back in Edinburgh, Campbell created several data-inspired pieces with colleagues, such as one based on the football-shaped buckminsterfullerene (or buckyball) molecule. Their efforts inspired another colleague at the university, chemist Cecilia Hong, to propose a Data Jam Workshop.For this collaborative, data- and music-based event, Hong and co-organizer Joshua Levinsky, a crystallographer also at the University of Edinburgh, invited anyone who wanted to create music about, or from, their science. Some graduate students, postdocs and professors had the coding skills to turn numbers into notes, others arrived with the music-arranging and production skills to turn a cacophony of notes into a coherent musical narrative.“It brought together people who’d never met before,” Hong says. “Their research didn’t overlap, but they clicked instantly — just through this shared aim of making music from science.”The Edinburgh jam session is part of a growing movement of scientists transforming their raw data into sound or music. Some are uncovering new patterns in their findings, others want to increase accessibility for people with limited vision, and many hope to captivate and reach broader audiences. For Campbell, the process of ‘musification’ has helped to foster a sense of community in the chemistry department and has provided a way for scientists at all careers stages to come together. “Sometimes, scientists just need a reason to connect,” he says.Audio insights But how does one turn data points into ditties? Campbell’s Boulder band usually opened with ‘RNaseP’, a piece named after a molecular machine that helps cells to make proteins. Initially, Campbell tried mapping the molecule’s nucleotide bases directly onto musical notes. “That turned out to be a learning experience,” he says. “I didn’t get music — I got noise.”The breakthrough came when he mapped the four RNA bases onto a pentatonic, or five-tone, scale. The result sounded promising, until he played it on a piano, which is best suited to conventional, repetitive sequences — not RNA’s unruly biology. Switching to a guitar solved the problem, enabling the crafted melody to capture RNA’s tangled architecture. Sometimes, Campbell played a loop of the tune in reverse to reflect the molecule’s ability to fold back on itself.Chemist and pianist Cecilia Hong co-organized the Data Jam workshop and performances for University of Edinburgh’s chemistry department. Credit: Philip AbramsomResearchers typically use graphs, informatics and imaging techniques to interpret research findings, but sonification — turning data into sound — can offer fresh insights when it comes to analysing data, says Margaret Schedel, a researcher of composition and computer music at Stony Brook University in New York.Schedel is blind in one eye and uses her finely tuned sense of hearing to perceive depth. A home experiment in 2011 helped her to appreciate that even non-musical researchers can glean insights from audio. For example, Schedel’s husband Kevin Yager, a materials scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, probes the structure of matter using X-rays. Schedel began playing around with sonic representations of his data. One caught his ear: a small glitch in the otherwise steady strum alerted him to a misaligned sample.How to have two careers, and be happy with bothSchedel’s sonification highlighted the error and her husband became convinced that he could use the technique in his lab. Yager and his colleagues make measurements as precise as 1/25,000 of the width of a human hair by aiming an X-ray through 20 pieces of equipment to focus the beam on a sample. If any piece of equipment is out of kilter, they can’t collect data properly.Schedel says that her husband can simply listen to an ambient sonification while working on something else and still quickly detect misalignment errors. Auditory systems outperform sight at detecting regular patterns over time, she says, and ears, unlike eyes, don’t have to focus directly on the data to discern fluctuations. The two researchers reported their findings in 2012 (M. Schedel and K. Yager Proc. 18th Int. Conf. Auditory Disp.; ICAD, 2012).Now, Schedel helps scientists to use sonification to expand their understanding of their data and to go beyond visual interpretations of their analyses.Selling science Although sound can deepen data analysis, physicist David Mahon at the University of Glasgow, UK, sees it as a way to connect with a non-scientist audience.Mahon studies muons, subatomic particles produced when cosmic rays strike Earth’s atmosphere. Muons are harmless radiation that are used by researchers to image inside inaccessible cavities, such as nuclear waste containers or volcanoes. But Mahon, a self-described ‘muonophile’ admits that, outside his field, muons are a hard sell for the public.Lowlands: where science meets musicAnd muon detectors are unglamorous: “What they do is amazing but how they do it is boring,” Mahon says.So, in a quest to jazz up muons, Mahon reached out to musician, artist and inventor Lomond Campbell. Campbell crafted an instrument called a Muonophone, which transformed detected muons into a constantly shifting electronic soundscape.At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival performing-arts event in 2025, Campbell performed a keyboard duet alongside the cosmic forces in a show called MŮO. Sitting in the dark at MŮO, listening to the sound of muons as they hit Earth’s surface was a “surreal experience”, Mahon says.At the event, Mahon’s graduate students spoke about muons with concert goers. The responses were overwhelmingly positive, Mahon says, and he thinks that the event raised awareness about how radiation can be used for good and could inspire students to pursue physics.Harnessing emotions Similarly, Hiroto Nagai, a geoscientist at Rissho University in Kumagaya, Japan, relies on music to create a visceral connection between listeners and climate concepts.Nagai, an amateur composer and musician who plays piano, saxophone and a string instrument called a mandocello wanted to promote a broader understanding of Earth’s climate system. So, he composed a haunting 6-minute piece for a string quartet, using satellite and meteorological data from the planet’s polar regions.He first wrote a computer program to extract the observational data and turn it into musical scale and pitch, which took about three months. Then, his job as musical storyteller began as he arranged the playable sounds into a narrative that vacillated between harshness, gentleness and warmth.
