Microbe Music

In 1996, as we neared completion of the Escherichia coli K-12 genome sequence, I heard that there was a band in Los Angeles called E. Coli. They had released the album "To Drool" that same year, so of course I had to have it. I tracked it down, and it was the beginning of my Microbe Music collection. Initially I restricted the collection to organisms we were working on, so the next acquisition was the debut album from the New Zealand band Salmonella Dub. Not surprisingly, Yersinia pestis has been quite popular among heavy metal bands as a band name, an album title, and a song title, and I picked up four examples. Since we didn't work on Bacillus anthracis, I had avoided picking up an album by the well-known band Anthrax, but as the collection grew -- and the Amerithrax case made the news -- I grabbed one from a used record bin. On that same trip I discovered Dengue Fever, easily my favorite album of the entire collection. I added a couple more related albums, and the picture below was the display in my old campus office -- you can click on each cover for more info on the band and album.

My operational concept for this collection did not include several possibly related themes, which I list here for anyone potentially interested in such things:

• Music derived from biological sequences: This is actually an idea predating any of these albums; there was software to do the transformation available as early as the 1980s. I actually have a cassette tape from 1985 entitled "DNA Music." For more on the topic see the Wikipedia entry on Protein music, or these pieces by Peter Gena and Mark Temple.
• Music "made from" microbes: See Biota Beats; here is a link to their video Microbial Melodies: Music made from bacteria.
• Music "made by" microbes: The fermentophone, an instrument played by microbes; here's another video.
• Studies on the impact of music upon microbes: This one was actually new to me; see this article from the New York Times or this paper from the Journal of Applied Biotechnology and Bioengineering.