"The Sound of Serotonin" Showcased at the Great Exhibition Road Festival

Our third-year Bioengineering student team has successfully completed The Sound of Serotonin, an interdisciplinary project exploring how serotonin recordings can be transformed into music, making complex neurochemical data more accessible, engaging, and interactive for wider audiences.

Using pre-existing serotonin datasets collected in the Hashemi Lab through Fast-Scan Cyclic Voltammetry (FSCV), the students adapted the existing NeuroStemVolt platform into NeuroStemSound, a software tool capable of processing serotonin recordings, identifying key signal features, and converting them into musical compositions.

The project combined bioengineering, data processing, software development, music, and science communication to investigate new ways of representing neuroscience data. Rather than relying solely on traditional graphs, NeuroStemSound enables users to experience serotonin dynamics through sound, offering an alternative and engaging perspective on complex biological datasets.

Following the completion of the academic project, the student team volunteered at the Great Exhibition Road Festival, where they developed an interactive exhibit that invited visitors to explore neuroscience through music. Festival attendees were able to mix and match melodies generated from different serotonin datasets, including recordings from the gut and brain under various treatment conditions, to create their own unique musical pieces. The exhibit encouraged participants of all ages to engage with neuroscience by listening, experimenting, and creating.

The project provided students with valuable experience in interdisciplinary research, software development, collaborative teamwork, and public engagement, while demonstrating the potential of sonification as a tool for communicating scientific data.

The project was completed by Yasmina Hajj Shehadeh, Ines Fair, Daniel Nahum, Iacopo Guiducci, Javier Cazorla del Castillo, Hetal Mehta, Joe Bashir, and Lavinia de Carolis, under the supervision of our very own PI Parastoo H. and her Graduate Student Pablo Prieto Roca.

Below you can find some pictures from the work and the stand.