Pinpointing the Rhythm of Tiny Plastics
Turning microplastics Raman spectroscopy into a public sonification experience, the microPlastics DJ.
A spectrum no one outside the lab could read.
Under the $2.2M NOAA MOSAIC partnership, Haoran Wei's lab uses Raman spectroscopy to identify microplastics, each particle returning a precise spectral fingerprint of what it's made of. The work brings together a real partnership: UW-Madison Engineering, UW-Madison Civil Engineering, Wisconsin Sea Grant, and the USGS, each contributing its own specialty to the whole. The science is rigorous and the data is beautiful. It is also, to a non-specialist, a wall of peaks on a chart.
Public engagement asked a harder question than "can we explain this?" It asked: can a person feel the difference between a fragment of polyethylene and a thread of polyester, without a single equation?
If you can't read a spectrum, hear it.
As Co-PI on the engagement work, I designed a sonification: a mapping that turns each plastic's spectral fingerprint into sound. Peak positions become pitches, intensities become rhythm and timbre. Every polymer gets its own signature riff, and the audience gets an instrument.
The lab and I called it the microPlastics DJ. Visitors mix real spectra from the Wei lab into a track, hearing the contamination in a water sample resolve into a beat they can follow. The science doesn't get simpler; the doorway in gets wider.
The data never changed. It just got a rhythm people could stand inside.
Rigorous research, in public, on the ear.
The microPlastics DJ became a portable public-engagement experience: faithful to the spectroscopy, yet open to anyone willing to listen. It connects a federally funded research program to the publics who live downstream of its findings.
It's one tile in the MOSAIC picture, and a model for translating instrument-grade science into engagement that doesn't dumb anything down. It is also the kind of project that grows out of STEMsaic Portal, where graduate students, faculty, and the professional staff around them build public engagement rooted in their own work, across campuses.