“One thing that’s nice about two majors is if I get frustrated with composing I can work on my chemistry homework, or if I have a long day in the lab I can go home and unwind by sketching some stuff at the piano.”

You read that correctly. Walker is a senior and a double major in chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences and composition in the Jacobs School of Music.

His work in the Brown research lab, led by Professor of Chemistry Kevin Brown, and his studies in music composition gave him an unusual idea. What if he could find a way to represent the sounds that molecules make?

Walker has dreamt of integrating chemistry and music since he was in eighth grade. It wasn’t until he took an electronic music class in the Jacobs School that he realized how he would do it, and that it would involve wearing an Einstein wig.

“In electronic music you’re really working with the nitty-gritty details of sound, and you have to know a certain amount of physics to understand how acoustics work,” he says. “Learning about that stuff in my courses and getting more exposure to some concepts in mathematics, I’ve been able to integrate things from chemistry - for example, making a composition where all the sounds come from molecules.”

He began by generating music from Python, the popular coding language, and producing MIDI notes with it. This then morphed into coding waveforms. Some physics aside, he says, “Working in Python allowed me to start with the simplest possible sound - a sine wave (or, in other words, a pure tone), and combine large numbers of them to make a much more complex and interesting sound. Really, all music is just a bunch of sine waves added together.” After trial and error and discovery, Walker learned that he could take a molecule’s frequency distribution, convert it into a waveform in Python, and from there, find the waveform (also called a signal) of the molecule - and that’s the “sound” it makes.

He used a technique called nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) to create his piece, “The Sound of Molecules.” Every sound used in the composition is the “signal” or sound of a molecule when analyzed with the NMR technique.

Walker is not the first person to use molecules in this way and create sounds, but he does believe that his composition represents something new to the genre.

“People have done this before, turned NMR data into sounds, and other people have also written pieces for acoustic instruments in which some aspect of the compositional planning is somehow reflective of the molecule’s spectrum,” he says.

But Walker’s approach to the piece is unique because it goes beyond finding a way to use sounds to represent molecules. Instead, his is a full-fledged artistic and educational endeavor in which every sound generated comes from molecules. “I was taking the audience through the molecular world and making them feel like they were an atom floating around, bonding with other atoms,” Walker explains.

“The Sound of Molecules” premiered in Auer Hall to an audience of chemistry and music students, as well as faculty and others who got the word that the concert was happening.

“As soon as I walked out on stage with the lab coat and Einstein wig,” says Walker, “I think people realized that it’s okay to laugh. I got so many awesome comments afterwards from both chemistry people and music people that were able to make it.”

The concert was a resounding success for Walker, a carefully crafted performance of sound and humor that informed and entertained.

In 2021, Walker received a Goldwater Scholarship, a prestigious national award for future scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. The scholarship not only helped fund Walker’s research and allowed him to take an internship with Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, but it also gave him a community to connect with during the early days of COVID-19 when everyone was staying home. 

“It’s really this incredible community of supportive and interesting people. During the summer, it was nice because they would host these game nights. I remember, one time, we were trying to play this game on Jackbox.TV and we spent 30 minutes just trying to develop the most optimal voting algorithm to figure out which game to play. And I was like, ‘Of course this group of people would have more fun discussing the intricacies of voting methods than actually playing games.’”

The Goldwater Scholars community and a trip to the Gulf Coast Undergraduate Research Symposium helped Walker clarify his love for presenting and communicating research. After attending a virtual Goldwater symposium held last summer that allowed the scholars to share their research, he became excited to share what he’d been working on.

“I knew I really liked lab work, being in the lab, and doing hands-on stuff, but I found I really like figuring out how to communicate complex ideas to diverse audiences in simple ways,” Walker says.

At the Gulf Coast Undergraduate Research Symposium, hosted each year by Rice University, Walker began getting into visuals after attending a faculty presentation that changed how he looked at science communication.

“The presentation was unlike anything I’d ever seen in organic chemistry,” he says. “It was so simple - the font was Futura, which is a fun, retro font. It might seem crazy to be focused on font so much, but it was really cool to see this accessible font in a scientific talk, and the whole thing was very friendly. Each slide had a lot of blank space and it was very visually appealing, and that made me think, ‘I am super interested in his research because he’s delivering it in such an effective way.’”

Even scientists can find public speaking, especially about their research, to be daunting, but not Walker.

After the success of “The Sound of Molecules”, Walker hopes to become a “DJ professor,” someday.

“I still think I want to be a chemistry professor because that’s what I’ve wanted to do since high school. I really love teaching, and I’ve tutored quite a lot—I really enjoyed that—and I think I’d really enjoy teaching, but I’d love to incorporate music into the classroom setting,” he says.

He recently won the Jacobs School of Music Innovation Competition, which awarded him a $3,000 grant to program an hour-long version of “The Sound of Molecules” for the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health, and Technology in Bloomington. The new version will premiere in September 2022 and will be open to the public, so mark your calendar! Walker will perform as “Maestro Molecules,” taking students on a “sonic tour of the molecular world.”

Wherever the DJ professor goes, there will be students who learn to marvel at what merging the arts and sciences can do.

Story by Devyn Blandford Boruff-Young