Sounds synthesis with slime mould of Physarum Polycephalum

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel application of bionic engineering: a bionic musical instrument using Physarum polycephalum. Physarum polycephalum is a huge single cell with thousands of nuclei, which behaves like a giant amoeba. During its foraging behavior this plasmodium produces electrical activity corresponding to different physiological states. We developed a method to render sounds from such electrical activity and thus represent spatio-temporal behavior of slime mould in a form apprehended auditorily. The electrical activity is captured by various electrodes placed on a Petri dish containing the cultured slime mold. Sounds are synthesized by a bank of parallel sinusoidal oscillators connected to the electrodes. Each electrode is responsible for one partial of the spectrum of the resulting sound. The behavior of the slime mould can be controlled to produce different timbres.

Composing with Biomemristors: Is Biocomputing the New Technology of Computer Music?

“…At the beginning of our research journey we were concerned with establishing relationships between specific properties of P. polycephalum and music. For instance, (Miranda et al 2011) reported an experiment whereby data related to the electrical activity produced by the plasmodium during foraging and its spatial-temporal behavior were converted into sound.…”

Bio-Imitation of Mexican Migration Routes to the USA with Slime Mould on 3D Terrains

“…In previous issues of Journal of Bionic Engineering we demonstrate how slime mould P. polycephalum could be used to intelligently manipulate objects on a water surface [11] and generate sensible sound patterns [10]. The slime mould's behaviour also inspired a range of software implementations of novel approaches towards design of communication and transport networks [18,19].…”

“…When in 2001 Nakagaki with colleagues published a paper on shortest path approximation with live plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum [7], and then three years later Tsuda, Aono and Gunji implemented Boolean logical gates with live slime mould [8], the scientific community got a unique living computing and actuating substrate, which is easy to cultivate and handle, monitor and experiment with. Slime mould P. polycephalum is an ideal biological substrate for developing biocomputing and bioengineering devices, because the slime mould is 'simple enough to be studied as spatially extended non-linear media yet robust and rich behaving to implement a wide range of computational and actuating procedures [9,10,11].…”

Enhancing the Social Impact of Contemporary Music with Neurotechnology

“…Research into Music Neurotechnology is truly interdisciplinary: it combines musical research with artificial intelligence, bioengineering, neurosciences and medicine. ICCMR's research outcomes have been published in learned journals of all these fields; for example [2,3,4,5,6]. This paper introduces one of ICCMR's most successful projects to date, which demonstrates the social impact of Music Neurotechnology research: the brain-computer music interfacing (BCMI) project.…”