It has long been a music industry practice to use science to create the catchiest melodies or the most appealing tones, but now, members of the University of Illinois Biophysics Sonification Group are flipping the script, using music to make breakthroughs in science.
The group, consisting of music professor and composer Stephen Andrew Taylor, chemistry professor and biophysicist Martin Gruebele, and Illinois music and computer science alumna, composer and software designer Carla Scaletti, is using sound to depict biomechanical processes and is making discoveries about the folding of proteins. Their specially developed digital audio software is giving new insight into protein formation through individual frequencies.
The details of their research can be found here along with an overview of their software.
You can watch a video of their work below.
Top image screenshot from YouTube.