Scientists Direct Cyborg Cicadas to Play a Horrendous Droning Rendition of "Pachelbel's Canon"

"Some of them were like, 'okay, use my abdomen.'" Pachelbel's "Canon in D" is like the Doom of the music world. It's been performed on everything from train horns to rubber chickens to strange juggling bells — it would truly be easier to find an instrument the Canon hasn't been played on. Recently, a new "instrument" entered the pantheon, only it's not an instrument at all, but rather an insect stuck with probes and zapped with electricity. If you're imagining the typical wedding arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon played on a harp or string quartet, you might be disappointed, because this particular rendition uses the face-scrunching sounds of the brown cicada. The "breakthrough" — if we're calling it that — comes from a team at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, which stuck a choir of cicadas full of electrodes to make them sing. The whole thing is possible thanks to the cicada's noise organs, called the timbal. Timbals are a pair of ridged membranes located in the cicada's abdomen ... Read full article.