It took me two reads to get it (mostly) but now I want one.

In their words: “Bacterial Orchestra is a self-organizing evolutionary musical organism. It consists of several audio cells. Every cell listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells.”

Every cell -consisting of microphone and a loudspeaker- listens to its surroundings and picks up sounds trying to play them back in sync with what it hears. It can be the background noise, people talking or sound played by other cells. Every cell is simple, but together they create a complex whole.

The piece was developed by Olle Cornéer, Christian Hörgren and Martin Lübcke.

I love this news piece posted on their site from last November as the micro-musical Frankenstein stirred:

“After tweaking the last bits and pieces the Bacterial Orchestra is now alive! From listening to it and playing around with it for just a few hours, we can tell you that this thing really has a life of its own.

Sometimes it clicks and sparkles really quietly, and beautifully we must say. At times it roars with distorted feedback making all the cells scream together. (We haven’t got a clue where the feedback comes from…)

At one point it even played the two first notes in a major chord. That was so scary Olle got tangled up in a loudspeaker and crashed it to the floor.”

We Make Money Not Art have a brief interview with the creators here.

For 99.95 euro you can adopt your own cell. |Sadly, as yet there seems to be no recording.