Harmony, 2025
Harmony is a multimedia work that bridges the microscopic world of bacteria with the sonic world of music. Bacterial samples were collected from 16 different musical instruments across New York City, each bearing its own microbial fingerprint. Once grown on agar, the samples revealed intricate and diverse colony patterns, highlighting how microbes not only exist independently but also flourish in collective networks. These natural patterns reflect a kind of microbial harmony—each organism contributing to a broader composition, much like individual instruments in an ensemble.
The project extends beyond the visual: a custom Python program was developed to convert bacterial growth patterns into sound. Through this translation, bacterial forms were mapped into musical waveforms, suggesting an underlying connection between biological and auditory structures. Just as bacteria exhibit rhythmic cycles and interspecies communication, so too does music rely on periodicity and layered interplay. Harmony proposes that the worlds of image and sound, life and code, are not separate, but deeply intertwined—revealing the shared logic of systems both seen and unseen.