About

Xiao Xiao (萧潇) is a Chinese-Born, American technologist, interaction designer and artist currently a PhD student in the Tangible Media Group of the MIT Media Lab. In her work, she applies insights from the art of piano playing to human-computer interactions and explores the experiences bridging the digital to the physical. Because of her involvement in design and music, we wanted to get her insights on the potential cultural impact of our bio-electronic system.

Fig 1: Xiao Xiao

Sonification of the Living

Time-scales

Our team described to Xiao Xiao how we could create an digital signal by reading the resistance in a liquid culture of bacteria. She was interested in the modulation of that signal by making bacteria react to the environmental around them - a "sonification of the living". She was curious about the synthetiser analogy between logic gates, additions and subtractions made possible by genetic logic and enzyme activity. She suggested using bacteria as captors of the surrounding environment and to translate that signal into a musical one: "music can make what happens to bacteria comprehensible to humans". We explained that signal from bacteria can be noisy and unpredictable. She responded that it's a question of mapping the parameters of your musical signal. We could have a basal rhythm that is complexified by the less deterministic biological aspects of the system.

Xiao Xiao asked us about the timescales of the signal detection, and after responding that gene expression is of the order of several hours, she had some ideas. To give us an example of music played over long periods of time, she referenced John Cage's piece "As slow as Possible" played on the organ which has been started in a church and will end in the year 2640, the next note programmed to play in 2024. The timescale of several hours in our case could be conserved, where bacteria respond to the environment, for example light or temperature, and make music throughout the day to generate an ambience.

She otherwise suggested that we speed up the signal and use it for storytelling. She referenced the Stanford collective who sonified 1200 years of earth climate transformation to communicate the impact of climate change through sound. She proposed that we could use bacteria to detect pollutants which would be communicated through music, and make humans aware of the microenvironment.

Integration

Xiao Xiao pointed out that, for musicians and artists to be able to create art from a bacterial electronic signal, we would have to create a synthesiser that interfaces between the bacterial activity and the digital. The artists could then make sense of these signals with sound, which could bring an emotional connection from humans to bacteria by the means of the digital. In order to integrate the possibility of a synthesiser in our project, we designed a three plasmid system which function as a synthesiser, in that it intakes a digital signal, transforms it, and transmits it back into an electronic signal. We created the hardware which can interface the biological world with the digital and thus produce new creative avenues for artists to explore. Talking with Xiao Xiao made us excited about the creativity that could be born from such a system and the cultural impact of our project.