Geoscientist Hiroto Nagai composed music about Earth’s climate system using meteorological data from the polar regions.Credit: K. R. Araragi
When 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 research
Once 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.”
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