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 open evening, we got a message from 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.
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)
- 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 ...
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.
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:
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.
For the Moss-i-phone (aka the Moss Carpet), Arduino UNO, the capacitative sensor software, 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...
For the EEG, Esther and Yngvar made progress, but also it seems some suction cups will be necessary to go along with the electrodes that arrived today... We are hoping to make more progress at the SGMK Homemade Summer Camp, this coming weekend.
Run / prototype #3
What's new compared to #1:
(If it’s an experiment) Parameters
- To vary | Values
- p1 |
- p2 |
- Constants (Key elements of set-up)
- c1 |
- c2
- To measure/ observe
- m1
- m2
Protocol (Plan)
Startup
Phase 1
do what | frequency | duration
Lab Notebook & News (Real)
We put our measures here: [link to other doc?]