Listening to Viruses: UCC Researchers Publish Interdisciplinary work at the Intersection of Music and Medicine.

6 Feb 2026

Dr. Stephen Roddy publishes paper on the sonification of virological data with Prof. Liam Fanning and colleagues at the Molecular Virology Diagnostic and Research Laboratory, APC Microbiome and the School of Medicine, UCC.

Dr Stephen Roddy (Radical Humanities Laboratory, Department of Digital Humanities, Future Humanities Institute) has published an article in Leonardo (MIT Press) with Prof. Liam Fanning (Molecular Virology Diagnostic and Research Laboratory) and colleagues at APC Microbiome and the School of Medicine.

At a time when the Biosciences are measuring data on a Petabyte (1 million gb) scale, the article specifies a system for turning synthetic virology data into music using a technique called sonification.

The system employs agent-based modelling to draw samples from the dataset and uses waveshaping and granular synthesis methods to map these data to musical parameters.

The system was debuted in a musical performance entitled Bacteriophage in Granular Waves for the concert series of the joint conference of Audio Mostly and the International Community for Auditory Display (AMICAD) in Coimbra in the summer of 2025.

This interdisciplinary research spans science, technology and the arts integrating techniques from music composition, media engineering and virology to create a novel way for audiences to experience and understand complex scientific data through the medium of sound.

You can read the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1162/LEON.a.2583