We’ve noticed a lot of musical groups are named after insects. Probably has something to do with the Beatles. (If you study that for a while you’ll spot the homophonic pun, and yes we know that the Crickets inspired the name.) There’s also Iron Butterfly, Adam Ant, and quite a few more. A recent art project by a Mexican team — Micro-ritmos — might inspire some musical groups to be named after bacteria.

The group used geobacter — a kind of bacteria found in soil — a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino, and a camera to build an interesting device. As it looks at the bacteria and uses SuperCollider to create music and lighting from the patterns. You can see a video of Micro-ritmos, below.

Music is a bit subjective, of course. We thought the music sounded a little oppressive. Not sure how much of that is the code and how much is the characteristics of the bacteria itself.

We’ve seen SuperCollider in a banana piano, before (these are popular because for most people bananas have appeal). We’ve also seen other natural processes generating sound like this project for presenting the sunset to the blind.