Mixing Music, Engineering, and Data

MIXING MUSIC, ENGINEERING, AND … VIRUSES? (YES, VIRUSES.)

Like most engineers, Alison Huffman enjoys a challenge. She’s also a musician, so when she heard about the Viral Machines project at Penn State’s Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and the need for a student engineer to turn data into music, she was intrigued.

“Because I have a background in music, I am always trying to tie the arts to technology in any way that I can,” said Huffman, who graduated from Penn State Behrend in May with a degree in Computer Engineering and a minor in Music Technology. “The initial proposal for the project was to write a program that takes COVID-19 data from an Excel spreadsheet and turns it into music.”

Viral Machines was the brainchild of Huck’s Daryl Branford, director of Science-Art Initiatives, and Tally Fisher, senior research artist. The goal of the project was to express the impact of viruses in a unique way. Though the project team started with COVID, any virus data can be used in the future.

“I was fascinated with Daryl’s initial idea for the project, which quickly grew from just music into an interactive experience that also includes visuals and light,” said Huffman, who received a Penn State Student Engagement Network (SEN) grant to work on the project.

Huffman’s first task was to write a computer program that would take virus data and convert it to Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) signals that could be imported into music software to create a song.

She then focused on designing an embedded system to control the visual display, which was to be mounted to the wall with an interface—a 3-D printed icosahedral-shaped structure—in front of it that allows users to interact with the exhibit, waving their hands over it to trigger light, videos, and audio.

Huffman said the Viral Machines project drove home for her the engineering design process: brainstorm, design, test, troubleshoot, and repeat until there is a working result.

“I applied every aspect of the engineering design process on both the hardware and software sides. It required a lot of planning, testing, and debugging, and I encountered many obstacles along the way,” she said.

Even that, though, is a lesson in engineering: Patience and perseverance are as key to the engineering process as calculus and physics.

“One of the most important pieces of advice I received at Behrend was, ‘Don’t paint yourself into a corner,’” Huffman said. “In other words, don’t base the final solution on one design. There were countless times I needed to redesign a part or use different electrical components to be compatible with the software or hardware I had chosen. I learned to be flexible and ready to redesign a solution at any step in the process.”

Before she graduated, Huffman created a working system that she helped install in the Huck Life Sciences Building at University Park.

Huffman recently moved to Melbourne, Florida, where she accepted a position at Northrop Grumman as a software engineer. The Viral Machines exhibit is currently on display in the Huck Building at University Park.