A music technologist’s uncharted journey through interdisciplinarity
An uncharted journey. This is perhaps the best way to describe how I moved through the labyrinth of so-called radical interdisciplinary research.
The journey really started with a collision between two things. Firstly, my fascination with sound production and perception as a musician and music technologist. Secondly, the curiosity of some life science researchers about the possible effects of musical sounds on cell cultures grown in the laboratory. My PhD project has been about merging these two as part of a project named ABINO funded by UiO:Life Science.
As a music technologist, jumping into a life science research project was intimidating and daring. Nevertheless, stretching the idea of sound perception to the cell level was more than just intriguing!
Radical interdisciplinarity
An aim of the project was to combine approaches from different research fields, including biology, music technology, and physics. I imagined that the aim would be fulfilled by assigning specific tasks to specific individuals or groups of researchers from each field. Just like how labor is divided within a factory to produce a product. Lo and behold, I soon realized that I was about to walk into a completely unknown territory of interdisciplinarity.
In his book Sound Actions (2022), Alexander Refsum Jensenius, a music technology researcher and professor at the University of Oslo (UiO), describes interdisciplinarity as “a real synthesis of approaches.” Yet, it was unclear to me how to reach such a synthesis. I also wondered whether any real knowledge could be gained from such an unusual approach. To find that out, I somehow had to leave my own field and jump over the institutional walls to venture into the realms of biology and physics.
Interdisciplinary endeavor: collaborative research effort
“Mingling” with researchers from other research fields was possible through the interdisciplinary space facilitated by the ABINO project and the two centres of excellence (RITMO and HTH) at UiO. In this conceptual and physical space, I could really explore theories, methods, and facilities that were accessible at the three different departments (biology, musicology, and physics) from three different faculties (Medicine, Humanities, and Mathematics and Natural Sciences) at UiO.
Thanks to my colleagues in the project, who were willing to collaborate and share their experience and knowledge, I was introduced and trained to work in biological laboratories, run experiments using various apparatus, and analyze and interpret biological data. Through this immersive interdisciplinary experience, I could start to better understand the others’ research perspectives, problems, and challenges.
This process of learning new “languages,” which is an idea reflected by J. Britt Holbrook (an associate professor of philosophy at New Jersey Institute of Technology) in his article What is interdisciplinary communication? (2012), helped me to see where there was a particular gap in life sciences research.
A fundamental phenomenon of life: rhythm
What I found interesting in this context is rhythm. Do you think cells ain't got rhythm? As a matter of fact, they are a complex system full of rhythmic processes. This is fascinating to me as a person with a music background. Rhythm is one of the essential elements to consider when thinking about music. In parallel, rhythm is also an important element in biology. For instance, we use rhythmic biological signals to detect the state of the system. A well-known example is irregular heartbeats (arrhythmia). Even at the cellular level, there are specific genes, such as the CLOCK gene, that regulate the circadian (approximately 24-hour) activities of the body. Not surprisingly, there is a research field dedicated to study and investigate biological rhythms: chronobiology.
However, it seemed to me that rhythm has not really made a strong impact in life science research, at least in the area of experimental studies using mechanical stimulation (e.g., sound waves) on cell cultures. Through my research, I tried to bridge that gap using concepts from music technology to play rhythmic sound vibrations to the cell cultures in the lab.
Dynamic microenvironment
Sound pressure waves have a great potential to be used as a contactless technique to probe cells on Petri dishes. Physicists from the ABINO project pointed out several physical limitations of using sound waves as a direct source of stimuli for the cells, but it can still be useful for manipulating the cells’ microenvironment indirectly. For example, sound vibrations could be used to rhythmically vibrate the Petri dish to keep the cell culture mechanically dynamic and active, mimicking the natural environment. Advancing and optimizing this technique to be used in tissue engineering is the ultimate goal of the current project.
Interdisciplinarity = open mind
So, was this journey of interdisciplinarity really worth it? Yes, definitely! Although it seemed too complex or even impossible at first, with an open mind, I could gain a much broader research perspective between academic disciplines where there is a lack of communication or that are disconnected.
As I find my exit out of the current interdisciplinary maze, I aim to deepen my understanding of the effects of rhythms on living organisms from a music and technology standpoint. I have been trained to be a radically interdisciplinary researcher after all, and that means standing at the frontier where research areas and their methods are combined to uncover new areas of knowledge.