Beer-Coated CDs are Optical Biocomputers

commodoresloat writes "A DJ and scientist in Melbourne whose research is in the area of communication through biological cells, serendipitously created an 'optical biocomputer' when he spilled beer on his CDs and left them over night. The resulting fungus that formed distorted the sound of the CDs in interesting and meaningful ways. Here's some of his research, and some media samples which include mp3s of the distorted music." Yes, the term biocomputer is used in the loosest sense.

Comments

Beer ... computers ... it's a wrap!

[the bluebrain]

The only "maningful" change results from the error correction logic in the CD drive.

• [...] the way fungus and bacteria [grow] can shape the sound in weird ways.

Tosh. It's flipping some of the bits in a bitstream which represents audio encoded with an arbitrary codec. Dude - there are more interesting ways of flipping bits, and ones that might just tell you a bit more about bacteria, fungi, music, life, the universe, and everything.
What's this guy on? I want some.

/beer, you say? Good. I can do that.

Re:Music?

[blincoln]

Formal music created through random, pseudo-random, or mathematical processes is almost a century old at this point. Check out some Schoenberg or John Cage. It may not be your kind of thing (I'm not really into it myself), but it is an interesting branch of art.

Re:Doesn't seem all that impressive

[zakezuke]

I too read this expecting some insight into how fractical geometery distortions would affect digital streems. Part of the argument why vinyl sounds better then CD to some people is in part due to fuzzy non-quanitative reasons such as warmth or feel aka noise and distortion, and research into so-called noise I feel is important to out understanding of the perception of sound. Let's face it, sound it self is not only vibration but it's reverberation off the ambient enviroment.

I heard garbled CDs, nothing more then garbled CDs. I see it being useful to create random distortions which in turn can be converted into software to achieve the same effect, and one day perhaps you can get something to sound neet and weird, but that seems to be the only redeeming value to these experiments.

I would be more interested to hear the effect on your standard issue sin waves rather then "this is not a love song". Atleast that way I can actually have some measure of understanding of the actual effect.

Undo copy protection with beer?

[dysprosia]

If you spill beer on a copy protected CD (you know, the kind with induced errors on it), does the fungus distort the errors so they disappear?

If so, will the fungus be sued under the DMCA?