Living Instruments v2

Living Instruments is a collaborative project between Swiss musician Serge Vuille (under the umbrella of the project WeSpoke) and the DIY science crowd of the community laboratory Hackuarium.

It creates musical compositions with a series of instruments that use bacteria, yeast and other living organisms, with some extra DIY tech (Arduino etc), to generate music. By interacting with the organisms and recording the sounds, gas bubbles, pressure, and movements they generate, the artists can transform data into music, creating a live, semi-improvised musical piece.

This was the original Living Instruments wiki page documenting the project's early development and concerts.

We were invited to recreate a 'version 2' of this project for the open night of local museums. On a day we planned to do a special musical evening for our #OpenHackuarium, we got a message from a curator of La Musée de la Main inviting us to do a special Living Instruments event for the upcoming 'La Nuit des Musées' the 27th of September 2025. It was such a great coincidence and a lucky chance.

Introduction

Context

This is a part of the Hackuarium project, Living Instruments

It is about experiments related to making music with living organisms.

One big hope is that the human brain (via EEG signals) will be the new 'living instrument' in time for the museum event this year.

People

Contact and lead: Esther Calderon

Participants:

• Serge Vuille, musician (personal website)

• Robert Torche, sound designer (personal website)

• Rachel Aronoff

• Yngvar Cramer Yngvar
  Thanks already for further help from some of the old team, like Oliver Keller!

Objectives

To make beautiful music and inspire others to mix life and tech for culture...

Pour créer une musique magnifique et inspirer les autres à mélanger la vie et le technologie au service de la culture... (traduction FR à venir)

Background & Inspiration

Background

The project began initially in early 2016, with several demos, workshops and even concert tours (including London, Darmstadt and other sites in Switzerland, even a Nuit des Musées in Neuchâtel). See the original project page Living Instruments ...

Living Instruments, circa 2017, in Neuchâtel

Inspiration

The current version is especially inspired by the hopes that the human brain can also be tapped as a living instrument, with EEGs... Some exhibitions at the EPFL were especially inspiring, for the EEG and for Music...

Other Hackuarium events were also inspiring, for instance, this one also many years ago.

Even more new projects, like this one about mushrooms making music, also inspire us...

However, we still draw our main inspiration from the first group's works, and are especially glad to have Serge and Robert in the mix!

Prototyping Day #1

Resurrecting the Yeast Organ (l'Orgue au levure) aka the Bubble Organ was the basis for our first gathering on 25Jul25, when we (Esther, Rachel, Serge and Robert) were happy to find basically all that's needed still packed in their big traveling boxes.

resurrection of the old yeast organ

5 big culture flasks, the magnetic stir bars and magnetic stirring modules (one needed to be replaced...and we luckily found one more), tubes and bubblers all came together well.

Setup description

General principle: getting the fermenting yeast cultures' CO2 through the bubbler system, and setting up all the musical interface in the MaxMSP software/music program... The full list is in the original documentation wiki page.

Construction

Step 1,2,3 in pictures:

In this test, the bubbles set off 'drum' kit sounds, 'live' 3s vid here

• 

  fitting tubes and bubblers with a first yeast culture...

• 

  filling the bubblers

• 

  listening

• 

  after first stages, looking good!

Prototyping Day #2

Getting the Moss-o-phone on line with the capacitance sensor is a second important task, facilitated by Richard at the FabLab of Renens. Trying to get the EEG together, with two electrode options, the expensive ones were ordered and arrived today (30July25), and Yngvar's DIY dry electrodes, is another big aim.

testing with a breadboard

For the Moss-o-phone (aka the Moss Carpet), Arduino UNO, the capacitative sensor software (even from the Arduino examples, in addition to Vanessa's old Github), and a special stable plaque with x2 10M Ohm and x1 1M Ohm resistors, makes it look like all should be good! Getting the patch to the MAX music program and setting sounds will come later with Robert, though we would like to make sounds already somehow...

For the EEG, Esther and Yngvar made progress, but also it seems some suction cups or some sort of gel will be necessary to go along with the electrodes that arrived today... We made more progress on both 'instruments' at the SGMK Homemade Summer Camp, the next weekend.

Prototyping Day #3+ (at the SGMK Homemade Summer Camp)

More tests with the mossophone and the EEG rig were made...

Lina Lopes and her EEG/AI project was also inspiring...

However, even with her special EEG cap, and electrodes, apparently, the EEG signal needs such a long time to stabilize (not to forget the need for Lina to shave little patches of her hair away to allow the EEG electrodes to have better access, esp to dab the special gel), she warned us that our big aim to use the human brain as an instrument, live, with people coming and going, would be very difficult. So, although we hope to make more progress in that regard, we will not be able to do the EEGs for the event at the museum, sadly.

Still, we did have some good experimental time. Here are some images (to the right): 1) our old mascot with our simplest eeg and the sensor for the bubblers of the yeast organ on one leg; 2) Esther at our table in the Waldhaus - where the mossophone also got some good tests (Pure Data isn't a simple learning curve, but might be useful.)

mascot EEG+

Esther at the Waldhaus table...

Runs / prototypes #4,5,6...

@ #OHs and other days, for instance, with Yngvar, in early August, got a little sketch together to run a little speaker based on the capacitance measurements. It doesn't sound pretty but gives more of an idea than just seeing output numbers or the serial plotter graphs from Arduino IDE.

Finally, 24sep is the 'Dress rehearsal day' at Hackuarium.

More tests on the mossophone:

with different wires - keep the thick one but add a very long one.

with wet moss vs dry moss - the dry still wasn't bad

Tests with yeast:

1.5L with two blocks of yeast + '10ml' (using conical tube to measure) of sugar - fermentation clear within a very short time.

See if bubbler can get a balloon full! =)

* at first, it looked possible, but by 1.5h, there was a clear decrease in fermentation.

* after adding another '10ml' of sugar, bubbling became more frequent and the balloon got still bigger. (see image)

An image with the yeast's fermentation starting to refill the balloon

However, the same thing happened again, and sugar was added a third time, aok. Still, it may well be worth making the correct yeast media, rather than just adding sugar to the yeast in water! If enough alcohol is made, of course the yeast's 'singing' might be compromised!

Plan

We plan to do x3 1h sessions at the museum, w/ 10min talk, 20min music, 30min for interactions...