This MIT professor sees music in coronavirus’ structure

Professor Markus Buehler has assigned musical notes to each part of the coronavirus’ structure, which has created a haunting musical composition.

Representational Image | The novel coronavirus | Pixabay file photo

We’re all now familiar with the spiky look of the coronavirus protein. But what do you think it might sound like?

An engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown us. By assigning musical notes to each part of the virus’ structure, he has created a whole composition which, as it turns out, is similar to the ambient music pioneered by Brian Eno.

“What you hear is a musical representation of the virus spike protein, which is the protein that affects the human cells,” Professor Markus Buehler told the World Vs Virus podcast.

His musical representation of the virus is, he says, more accurate than classical static diagrams that fail to show the virus’ constant movement and vibration.

“They don’t actually look like they look in a chemistry textbook because atoms and molecules are continuously moving. They kind of look like a vibrating string.”

And it is that vibration that fascinates Buehler, who is looking at whether it can be exploited to combat the virus.

“That is something we have been thinking about for this protein and other proteins in the last couple of years, to use the knowledge of the nanoscopic vibrations as a way of actually disintegrating the structure.

“I do a lot of research on fracturing of materials in my work and a lot of times we’re trying to prevent fracturing from happening. But in this case, we actually are trying to find a pathway to deliberately destroy a structure. Vibrations are a really important pathway to do that.”

And the interlinking harmonies created by musically mapping proteins might also tell us something about our own creative process.

“Counterpoint is something that musicians have played with and explored for a couple of centuries and we actually find that this idea of counterpoint is really prominent in the structure of proteins, in particular in the folding, as well as the folding of our brain,” Buehler said.

That means we could look at music, “not only as a display of art or creativity, but actually as a way of learning about the underlying structure that has created this art” – the human brain.

This article was originally published in the World Economic Forum.