During his years as a grad student in biochemistry at the University of Chicago, Josiah Zayner spent a lot of time thinking about proteins. But they still remained somewhat abstract. “A protein is very tiny and small,” he says. “You can’t touch it or feel it or interact with it. I began thinking that if you could interface biology with electronics, you might be able to interact with proteins.”
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Zayner was working with a group of plant proteins, called phototropins, that respond to light. If he could use light to trigger a reaction in those proteins, he thought, maybe he could harness that reaction and use it to produce something tangible, like a sound. Or music. He began looking around for someone who understood both music and electronics and found Francisco Castillo Trigueros, a composer and fellow PhD student.
To play the Chromochord, Zayner and Castillo Trigueros hook up a laptop to the microprocessor. “We program the score,” Castillo Trigueros explains, “the pattern of lights that trigger the proteins.” And then the music comes out through the computer.
