Chemistry is elemental to music

Molecular muses for music

Aduro Clean Technologies is a fairly typical chemistry start-up with promising prospects. What is not typical is that it commissioned a musical composition to celebrate its science.

The company is developing a water-based plastic recycling process that it claims consumes less energy than competing pyrolysis processes. And what could be more convincing than The Between, a mellifluous piece written for piano with narration that illustrates the company’s technology?

The Between, a performance of which is posted online, is a musical metaphor for Aduro’s technology. The first movement, “Nature Singing,” is a spritely melody. It prompts listeners to think of birds, trees, giraffes, or whatever it is that they associate with nature. “Like the notes in a sonata, nature is a complex arrangement of molecules,” the narrator says.

The tone shifts in the next movement, “Plastic Talking,” which is based on the repetition of a single note. Of course, chemists will recognize that this represents monomers strung together in a polymer. In the next section, “Technology Working,” the single-note motif breaks into other musical phrases, presumably to echo the way Aduro’s technology uses water and heat to break polymer backbones. And the final movement, “Singing Again,” returns to evoking nature.

Curious about how the piece of music came to be, Newscripts reached out to Brian Roth, one of the composers. Roth writes music and arranges audio primarily for television—with some 1,200 episodes under his belt. Through mutual connections, Aduro’s principal scientist, Marcus Trygstad, contacted Roth with the idea of putting Aduro’s chemistry to music.

“Music is full of patterns; so is chemistry,” Roth tells Newscripts.

Christine Hahn, a chemistry professor at Texas A&M University Kingsville, would agree. Hahn is a cellist and is interested in the intersection of music and chemistry. Back in 2019, inspired by the 150th anniversary of the periodic table, she tells Newscripts that she decided “why not celebrate the elements by writing little sonatas for each element?”

Hahn assigned each group of the periodic table its own key to represent each group’s specific chemistry. Hydrogen, her first composition, is in A minor. She has thus far also composed Helium (C major) and Chlorine (G sharp minor). She is currently working on sulfur in A major, a “strong, bright key,” she says.

Another effort along these lines is the Art of Polymers concert series, a collaboration between the US National Science Foundation’s Center for the Chemistry of Molecularly Optimized Networks (MONET) and composer David Ibbett. The concerts feature pieces inspired by polymers interspersed with explanatory interludes.

The next installment, coming up in June at Harvard University’s Center for Astrophysics, will be based on a Science paper about how stress sensitive molecules can enhance the tear strength of polymers.

Songs in the key of Ge

Guitarists want to sound like their rock heroes from the 1960s and 1970s, so they buy equipment still made to the old specifications. Hence, many new amplifiers employ vacuum tubes instead of solid-state transistors.

Similarly, pickers pine for germanium.

The very first transistor, produced at Bell Labs in 1947, was based on germanium. Transistor technology took off, but silicon replaced germanium in the 1970s because it is cheaper and has better thermal stability.

But germanium transistors are still around in guitar effects pedals, particularly in distortion units that provide the fuzzy, signature tone of rock music. The Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone pedal that Keith Richards used on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” incorporates germanium transistors.

Newly manufactured pedals that use germanium may be more authentic, but do they sound better?

Plenty of YouTube videos weigh in on the topic. And on his blog, Robert Keeley, of pedal maker Keeley Electronics, opines: “Subjectively the sound of Germanium offers a smoother, more-ear-pleasing distortion,” he writes. The narrower bandwidth of Ge pedals, he explains, filters out higher, harsher frequencies, and lower gain “can sometimes lead to more gratifying sounds.”

Please send comments and suggestions to [email protected].