Translating Slime Mould Responses: A Novel Way to Present Data to the Public

Slime mould Physarum polycephalum is repelled by light. We inoculated a multi-electrode array (MEA) Physarum and discovered that the Physarum’s response to light was recordable as an electrical signal on the MEA—the response was identified aurally from sonification of the electrical data. In order to illustrate this result to the general public we decided to associate the sonified data responses with an emotion, which was then emoted by a robot ‘actor’ consisting of a mechanised robotic head. The data was split into chunks; the chunks were given a polarity based on whether there was light (a repellent) or food (an attractant) and a level of arousal based on the volume of the chunk (power of the electrical signal): the chunks were then assigned an emotion using the circumplex model of affect. The soundtrack of sonified responses to stimuli was then played alongside the robot emoting: the project was presented at the Living Machines exhibition at the Science Museum. The meaning of the sonified data was easily understandable by members of the public and to which they responded with enthusiasm and interest in scientific endeavours. Thus we suggest, although unconventional and not the most scientifically rigorous way of presenting data, there is a place for using humanity’s emotional responses to communicate experimental results to the general public.