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The Singing Yeast Cell

From: Claes Andreasson
Length: 00:12:45

The sounds that cells make Read the full description.
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Piece Description

You can hear your heart beat. It makes a sound. So do other cells. By using the tiny, soft "finger" of an Atomic Force Microscope, scientists at the Univ. of California Los Angeles, were able to feel the week, mechanical motions inside a cell. When these motions were transformed into sound, you can hear the cell sing. Graduate student Andrew Pelling and professor James Gimzewski are featured in this story about singing yeast cells. The story airs on the experimental Internet and DAB SRc broadcast on Swedish National Public Radio in the Spring of 2004. To watch the "video"/slide show version of "The Singing Yeast Cell", please visit: http://www.nicala.org/yeastcell.htm

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Review of The Singing Yeast Cell

What an intriguing piece! Talk about science as the composer, or interpreter rather. Nano technology helps UCLA scientists listen to the 'music' created by yeast cells. The piece may inspire artists or musicians to create unusual rhythms or sounds. It may inspire other scientists to stop and listen to their experiments for a change. Every living being has a voice, some have unprecedented ways of expressing them. We just have to listen between the sounds. Great for educational purposes.

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Review of The Singing Yeast Cell

This is an amazing piece. I find that it is an interesting combination of content: a blend of ethereal music, factually based interviews and a rather intriguing use of noise generated by the yeast cells themselves. While the content is grounded in science, there are some very experimental and artistic qualities that cannot be ignored. This piece really reminds me that science is as much about how one interprets data as about how the data is gathered. The pacing, the etherealness of the tones and the moody qualities of the music made it very difficult for me to follow the dialog, but I sense that this was intentional. After all, I was listening to physical matter vibrate. Excellent!

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Review of The Singing Yeast Cell

The piece is portraing the types of sounds that can be detected with an atomic force microscope. This represents a fascinating new application to microscopy, and something that one might have origianlly thought too esoteric for most science labs. When I interviewed for graduate schools I was asked by a professor at Penn what a cell sounds like. Esoteric. But ever since I have been dying to know what cells sound like and the microscopic level. As a yeast microscopist, I have always wanted to know how loud the "Click" is when a cell divides in two woth a violent splitting of the two cells. Now the technologie is availble. However this radio piece is overly complexed with different audio noise that there is essentially little to be learned. Essentially a scientific journalistic attempt is overpopulated by cliche sounds and techno tracks that there is little left of the original scientific interest. In fact a casual listener would certainly be lost in the breadth of sound bytes presented. To move this piece to the radio cut heavily and tighten the air-time to the scientific interest to have a compelling story.

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Musical Works

"Jeux d'eau" (Benoit Jutras) From Cirque du Soleil "O" Cirque du Soleil 09026-63358-2
"Look in My Eyes" (Mark Isham) From motion picture "The Cooler" KOC CD 5707
"Crime scene" (Cliff Martinez) From motion picture "Narc" TV-6670-2

Additional Files

Related Website

http://www.nicala.org/yeastcell.htm