#64: The Key to Understand All the Secrets Stored in Man?
Music as a relatively untapped resource to teach and share science.
I don’t remember how I knew that David had the prize lying in the half-ton Ford pickup - not his dusty black Trans-Am emblazoned with the gold “firebird” on the hood - but all I knew is that I needed the prize.
Carefully closing the patio door, I skulked towards the vehicle. My parents were somewhere in the house, but careening towards a divorce, I felt safe that they weren’t in the bedroom, where the truck lay in view. The truck doors opened easily - it was my backyard, after all, so why would he need to lock it? Quickly but quietly, I snatched my bounty and escaped to my room.1
I had a combination radio/cassette tape/CD player, and some of Columbia House’s finest, but not this “rubbish”. Slipping on the headphones, I fast-forwarded the tape until I heard those first iconic few chords came through.
Music has always been an overlay to the times in my life. The astute observer among you will have noticed previous Campfire Notebook titles and recognize snippets of songs, lyrics that were pilfered, like a brand new cassette tape from the hot band. I appropriate lyrics a lot; when I’ve not used book quotes to inspire titles for artwork, I will usually use song lyrics. I’m also firmly on “Team Music” while writing and doing other work. (I’m listening to that same ill-gotten booty as I type right now!) Depending on the level of concentration needed, I’ll move from the very familiar (i.e., I need to focus on the work, not the music), to the brand new releases (i.e., I’m cleaning data and my eyes will fall out of my skull without musical notes to tether them into their sockets).
It’s no wonder, then, that I decided to explore the place of music in #SciArt.
My results of my search feel like a journey to the centre of the Earth. There’s the initial layer of crossover fandom: music artists who share their love of science and in doing so, advocate for a particular field or broader cause, such as more inclusivity and diversity. A little deeper, we have the musicians who just happened to get their PhDs - Dr. Sir (or Sir Dr.) Brian May got one in astrophysics after fussing about with a garage band.2
Journeying further, we get to music as means of knowledge translation. Can we use song lyrics to share information about science? It seems that there are a few approaches to the matter, outlined in a recent paper on instructional design (that folks like my husband and
might particularly find of interest). The authors propose several models of learning science with music that increase in learner engagement intensity, from passive enjoyment (of both songs about science and those songs that touch on scientific concepts, but were not originally written to share science in an educational realm3) to actively spinning rhymes as part of an assignment to demonstrate learning. The argument here is that only “casually” using music can degregate learning to simple rote memorization, which is good for initial learning, like planets in the solar system and trigonometry properties, but not to demonstrate that real learning of science has been had. To do that, you need not only analyze science song lyrics, but find engaging ways to infuse science into music.
I found an example of creative science music in this interesting interview from American Scientist with, of all people, a white Canadian rapper who actively collaborates with scientists to go far beyond the realm of a children’s performer singing about the weather:
I wrote my master's thesis comparing like Medieval and Renaissance poetry competitions with freestyle battling and hip-hop. And I argued that they were both sort of products of highly stratified unequal societies…looking at hip-hop, I would hear that in the rappers’ lyrics as well. And their story would be like, ‘I came from nothing, people recognize my talent, and now look at me…
Dirk “Baba” Brinkman (Science and Hip Hop: Using Music to Communicate Science, 2021).
Brinkman now collaborates regularly with scientists, who peer review his lyrics for accuracy. We stan a legend dedicated to getting the facts right.
What I was really looking for, though, was a deeper core of music as #SciArt. Do scientists use music as an artistic tool to explore new patterns and visualize their data? And they do: assigning notes to different pieces of data, then playing it, allows the person to identify a pattern that was otherwise lost in a massive dataset. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin notes that science has a creative element to it but which can sometimes be ignored in favour of a more prescriptive recipe for analysis.
He started his own system of assigning notes to the different elements of DNA—human DNA is made of four distinct bases, so it was easy to start off with four notes—and made a little tune out of his test-tube materials. This trick indeed helped him better spot patterns in the sequences, he says, which allowed him to make better choices about which DNA combinations to use.
Mark Temple, in Why Scientists are Turning Molecules into Music (Quigley, 2022)
Like listening for the needle in the haystack.
I’m going to keep searching for more examples of musical #SciArt visualizations, but hope you’ve enjoyed reading a bit more about the intersection of music and science. As I was thinking up this post, I was inspired to create my own homage of science-infused songs, shared below.
Think of it as a mixtape you can steal from my truck of knowledge.4
I returned the tape after a few days!
Any of my friends still slogging out and getting grief from the School of Graduate Studies can point to his 30-year absence.
Crowther G. (2012). Using science songs to enhance learning: an interdisciplinary approach. CBE life sciences education, 11(1), 26–30.
And yes, the song worth petty theft is on there.
Ooh, "Chemistry" from Signals -- nice. The music on that album is somehow *tangible* to me.
I love music, but rarely listen to it while I work because I need to be approachable! I do listen to music while doing art at home, at least.