Do You Know That Bacteria Can Be Turned into Music?

A group of scientists, musicians, engineers, and artists have created Biota Beats, a project that translates human microbiota into hip hop music. The group was originally inspired to start the project for a synthetic biology competition called iGEM in 2016.

In order to create the music, the group states: “We made a wonderful system that takes micro-organisms from the body, which can be inoculated on our “biota records” (designed to be like real EP/LP vinyl), and our system analyzes the bacteria and transforms the resultant data into music.” For the November 2017 iGEM competition, Biota Beats sampled bacteria from different body parts from competitors across the world to create a new song for the closing ceremony, highlighting a global science community that shares a common love of science and biotechnology.