Short Wave - Making Music Out Of The Coronavirus

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

When Markus Buehler heard about the coronavirus, he wanted to know what it sounded like. Today on the show, Maddie speaks with Short Wave reporter Emily Kwong about how Markus Buehler, a composer and engineering professor at MIT, developed a method for making music out of proteins, and how music can potentially help us hear what we have trouble seeing at the nanoscale level.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everybody. Maddie Safaya here with shortwave reporter Emily Kwong. Hey, Maddie. Hey, you. So earlier today, you emailed me a ticket stub, a hand-drawn ticket stub, which reads, admit one protein music concert composed by nature. Were you intrigued? It was very weird and adorable.

It was Emily Kwong, honestly. I don't mind that being my personal brand. I will say, though, Quang, the art looked more like DNA than protein, but we can talk about that way. Oh, boo. Get out. Get out. I don't have time to draw protein structure in this economy. Anyway, I'm glad you received your ticket stub, and before you are seated for this protein music concert, I want us to fully appreciate the person who made it possible. Hi, hi, Emily. This is Marcus. Hey, Marcus. Marcus Bueller is a materials scientist who's long been fascinated by music and how music gets made.

He grew up in southern Germany near Stuttgart. In the 80s and 90s, he got really into recording and mixing music from his keyboard. Okay. Okay, Marcus. He even had a band called Titanic Disasters. Disasters, plural? Disasters, plural. They got noise.

complaints from the neighbors once and his mom broke up the jam session. My mom came out and she said, you know, if you keep playing that loud, you know, I'm going to have to live here for the rest of my life. What am I going to do? Marcus didn't love performing, but he did enjoy writing music. You know, recording sounds and especially layering them. I think it's just the most interesting experiences. It's like, you know, I'd like to ride or paint. So he's fascinated by how things work, right? How the design of something allows it to do his job. So no surprise, he became a material scientist. Those people study how materials are

made at, like, the most basic level. Yeah. And his lab studies materials found in nature, like spider silk. And he's especially interested in proteins. Who isn't? Building blocks of life, baby. Honestly, proteins are so cool. And for years while giving lectures and talks, he'd use music, his lifelong hobby, to explain protein structure. One of the objectives I always have is to get as many people excited about science as possible. And so music is just a way to get into that. Because you don't have to be a scientist to pick out the structures of music, right? You can listen and hear different instruments, different tones. So for years, Marcus was using music as an analogy to explain that complexity. Then one day, while chatting with his wife, who is also a scientist,

Power couple. Yeah. As they left the house, he had this light bulb moment. What if he could turn this music analogy into a reality? What if he could use proteins themselves to make music, translating their structures into sound? And would that help him understand proteins better? And she said, wow, that's amazing. You've got to write a big paper about it. And I said, I don't know. So today on the show, one scientist's quest to model protein structure with music, and we

listen to one of his latest compositions, a music rendering of a key part of this coronavirus. Okay, Emily Kwong, today we're speaking with Marcus Bueller, who we last heard had just had this realization that maybe he could turn protein structure into pieces of music, which both intrigues and confuses me. Okay, so spoiler, Marcus was able to figure this out. And to explain, we first need to go back to Biology 101 and talk about proteins. What do we know about them? Well, we wouldn't exist without them. Proteins are kind of the big time workhorses in living or. organisms, antibodies, some types of hormones, your butt, all made out of proteins.

Well, thank you, Maddie, for the reminder. And following the instructions of our DNA, our cells are building these proteins from different kinds of amino acids. And this gives the protein its unique structure. The protein chains can wind around themselves, folding into a 3D arrangements. Now, you may remember high school biotime, these diagrams of proteins that look kind of like multicolored blobs. Sure, sure. For Marcus, these drawings are cool, but they're missing something important because they're fixed, static. But... In reality, any matter actually is not static.

Matter is made up of atoms and molecules that are pretty much constantly moving. Even a rock just sitting there is made up of atoms and molecules dancing to their own vibration. And drawings don't really capture that all matter moves, especially in living organ. So the whole world is really moving and moving all the time. And these motions are really elementary and fundamental to what the world is like. And that includes the amino acids that make up proteins. So Marcus and his colleagues found a way to turn that scientific, vibrational data into music. They took the known vibrational frequencies of those amino acids,

and using computers transposed those vibrations into sounds we humans can here, creating a 20-tone scale. So the amino acids got their own tones? Yes, they did. He created this app called amino acid synthesizer, inviting you to build your own proteins using these 20 tones. Synthesizer works on so many levels. Yes. And I have the app right here. So this sound represents the amino acid al-alene. Oh, that's a good one. And this is cysteine. And this is histidine. Oh, a little baby protein is born. Yep, the start of one.

So figuring this out, Marcus was like, I got to take this to the next level. Sounds like Marcus. Yes. So you know how proteins are chains of amino acids? Mm-hmm. Well, using his newly developed amino acid scale, Marcus realized he could translate that chain, amino acid by amino acid into sounds. But that's not all. By messing with the volume of the sounds and the duration of each sound,

he could mirror how proteins are folded or their shape and turn whole proteins into pieces of music that you and I can listen to. So the individual tones represent the different amino acids, but the more complex parts of the music represents the structure or the shape of the protein. Exactly. Which means it's concert time? Oh, you better believe it is. We are treated today to a concert of silk and amyloid composed by nature, arranged by Marcus J. Bueller. Oh. It's like busier than I expected, maybe? You know what this sounds like, Kwong?

What? Like a super dope 80s video game. Yeah, it's kind of neat. And it's not random at all. It follows the structure of a silk protein and an amyloid protein. And this next piece he calls Concert of Enzyme, Lysazime. Ooh, licezymes are nasty. I can't wait to hear this one.

Oh. Again, this just reminds me of video games, but now we're at the boss, the boss level, you know? So you're ready to fight. Yeah, I'm ready to fight. I'm licezyme, and I'm going to bust up some bacteria like a boss. Okay. So why does this sound like music and not this random assortment of notes? Ah, yeah, that is a very good question.

So for Marcus, this new method of protein sonification reveals just how orderly and rule-following nature really is. It's not random at all, but a careful product of natural selection. And in music, you're hearing that structure play out. You hear this algorithm that nature uses to create this protein and to make this protein stable to make it functional. And that's very similar to the kinds of algorithmic concepts that we use in music as well. Marcus does take some artistic license in choosing which instruments he uses, but the music itself is dictated by nature. He said it's more like writing code than creating music. He's made dozens of tracks like collagen etude and lysisam rhythm.

So when the new coronavirus came along, right, he immediately took an interest because the virus gets its crown-like appearance from proteins. It's surrounded by spike proteins. And some of those are the proteins. that make the virus so good at attaching to human cells. Exactly. He wanted to model that, turn the spike proteins into a piece of music, to see if he could learn about its structure. And he put the piece on SoundCloud, where it now has almost a million lessons.

Whoa. We had this really bleak moment in history. It's turned out to be his biggest hit. It's called viral counterpoint of a coronavirus spike protein. Emily, this is nice. Like I feel soothed. Right? And I listened during a walk, Maddie, and it was just strangely meditative.

So he uses this instrument called a koto. It's this kind of Japanese zither. And he chose that as the main instrument so that it wouldn't overpower the other instruments to represent the protein's very intricate structure, all these layers kind of playing against each other. And Marcus says the piece has millions of notes. So how have people reacted to it? I mean, I feel like I really like it.

Right. There's been a variety of reactions. So dance groups in Poland and Finland have created choreographed pieces to it. People have been wanting to sample it into their documentaries. I've gotten a lot of emails and comments on social media. People saying, oh, finally, something beautiful about this virus. Someone even commented on SoundCloud. Why is this coronavirus so damn chill?

I mean, it's a terrible virus, but the protein is, you know, quite incredible. It has a lot of really detailed structures, and it has a lot of balance between order and disorder. Which Marcus says surprisingly makes the music pleasant, full of repetition, but also surprise. So is there any way that this could help us deal with the virus in a more, I don't know, practical way, kind of? Yeah, so Marcus and his colleagues are collaborating with other labs to explore potential applications for therapy drugs or antiviral treatments. Obviously, this is a very unorthodox method of modeling. Sure. I mean, there's like the conventional protein modeling with computers that is already pretty powerful. Yeah, but the possibilities excite him because he wants to make the virus intelligible through the language we all understand.

And that's the universal language of music. I've always argued, as we've talked about in the beginning, that music is another type of microscope we can use to understand the world. And I think this particular virus was sort of a convergence of the science being important, but also the public interest being important. And he hopes that this offers an avenue for people to engage with this virus beyond fear, allowing them to more deeply understand and even respect it the way scientists do. It's something most of us will never be able to see, but can now perhaps, in a way, hear and feel. All right, Emily Kwong, thank you for the story.

and the concert. Oh, you're welcome, Maddie. Today's episode was produced by Yo-Wei Shaw, edited by Viet Le, and fact-checked by Emily Vaugh. You can check out all of the Marcus Bueller original pieces you heard in the show on our episode notes online. I'm your host, Maddie Safia. I'm your reporter, Emily Kwong. And we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR. We're spending more time at home than ever before. So now's a great time to finally adopt a dog, right? Socialization is going to be hard. because socialization and social distancing are definitely at odds. So before you decide to adopt a canine companion during quarantine,

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