'Music from the Worm Farm': neurobiology meets new music

19 March 2009

‘Music from the Worm Farm’ is a six-month residency funded by the Wellcome Trust, involving composer Keith Johnson and neurobiologist Dr Stephen Nurrish. Music that Keith has composed while working in Stephen’s lab will be performed at the Dana Centre in London tonight (Thursday).

The collaboration has drawn on science and music to explore the connections between the brain and the body, as well as comparing ways of doing scientific research and composing music.

Pianist Philip Howard and ensemble [rout] will perform two bodies of work composed by Keith during his residency with the Nurrish lab in the MRC Cell Biology Unit at University College London. 'Book of mutants', for the piano, consists of 18 mutated versions of a short piece by Bach, whereas two works for ensemble use the lab's research data to control the integration of songs by Mahler and Joni Mitchell.

"In my lab, we study how brain cells talk to each other," says Stephen. "The release of chemicals from one cell to another causes a change in the receiving brain cell. One of the key chemicals in the brain is serotonin, which has been linked to depression, eating disorders and alcoholism.

"We use the small nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism to investigate how serotonin works. C. elegans uses serotonin in the same way as humans, but their brains have only 302 cells as opposed to 10 billion in ours. The genes required for serotonin to work properly are present in both species, though, so what we find in C. elegans can give us an insight into how human brains function."

Keith has taken some of the research methods of the lab and applied them to his music. "For instance," he says, "the piano music I have been writing has been a response to the use in the lab of deliberate mutations to their model organism. I've made systemic changes at root level to various different parameters to generate mutations in my own model organism, the C major Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 by Bach, to explore the ideas of musical locomotion and mood."

Audio: 'Double spiral' mutant (1 min 24 s)

Audio: 'Bag of worms' mutant (2 min 22 s)

In the same way that changing a gene in C. elegans helps increase our understanding of the way the organism works, altering one note or aspect of the C major Prelude can help discover more about the way the piece is structured - whether or not the resulting tune is 'viable' (e.g. aesthetically pleasing).

Keith adds: "The ensemble pieces 'Porous with travel fever / MDA and serotonin' and 'Still ist mein Herz / Aldicarb' take this further, using data from experiments that focus on how the worms move to control the bringing together of the final part of Der Abschied, from Das Lied von der Erde by Mahler, and Hejira, by Joni Mitchell. Their combination serves to explore the relationship between movement, stillness and mood in a more sophisticated way."

Audio: 'Aldicarb assay' duet (1 min 36 s)

As well as using analogies of experimental procedures to create new music, Keith has been examining the links between the brain and behaviour throughout the residency. "Music has long been thought to express or trigger emotions and internal states of being," he says. "There is also a sense in which music possesses an innate physicality, not just because it sometimes makes us want to move, which is often necessary for its performance, but because it can have a kind of form that embodies ideas.

"These ideas of the mental and physical are embodied through the transformations that particular musical ideas undergo in a particular work."

The clips available here and on Keith's blog were produced on a computer. The live performances tonight will sound quite different, adding layers of emotion and meaning to the music from the worm farm.

Image: Dr Stephen Nurrish (left) and composer Keith Johnson

Credit: Keith Johnson