Capturing Cancer as Music: Cancer Mechanisms Expressed through Musification

TL;DR

Capturing Cancer with Music proposes musification as a platform to convey complex cancer mechanisms to a broad audience by translating cellular mutations into musical mutations within a leitmotif. The core method mutates music via operations that emulate genetic changes and therapeutic silencing, implemented in Python and accessible through MusicXML via music21. Two laboratory studies show that presenting a text article alongside mutated music yields marginal gains in cancer literacy over article alone, highlighting the complementary role of audio in education. The work demonstrates a potentially impactful educational tool that can reach diverse audiences, including those with visual impairment, and invites further refinement using non Western melodies and patient-centered evaluations.

Abstract

The development of cancer is difficult to express on a simple and intuitive level due to its complexity. Since cancer is so widespread, raising public awareness about its mechanisms can help those affected cope with its realities, as well as inspire others to make lifestyle adjustments and screen for the disease. Unfortunately, studies have shown that cancer literature is too technical for the general public to understand. We found that musification, the process of turning data into music, remains an unexplored avenue for conveying this information. We explore the pedagogical effectiveness of musification through the use of an algorithm that manipulates a piece of music in a manner analogous to the development of cancer. We conducted two lab studies and found that our approach is marginally more effective at promoting cancer literacy when accompanied by a text-based article than text-based articles alone.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: A brief illustration of musical terms necessary to understand our approach. Instruments within a piece are assigned parts, which are split into groups of notes called measures. A note informs the musician which sound should be made on their instrument, while a rest denotes silence. At the top right, a piano keyboard is shown to illustrate the concept of tones and octaves. Each key plays a tone that resides within an octave -- there are twelve tones within an octave, and they repeat indefinitely.
• Figure 2: Examples of possible mutations within a piece. Going from left to right, insertion takes a sub-sequence of notes and repeats it (note that the C and E become CECE). Inversion reverses the order of the notes. Deletion replaces a note with a rest. Translocation replaces the measure with a random measure from the rest of the piece. Transposition modifies the pitch of the notes in the measure by a random amount.
• Figure 3: A sample mutation in action. The boxes denote the cancer theme that is mutating. The top-most red theme was replicated twice, creating two more mutant parts, marked in green and blue. Then, one of the blue child mutated again, forming the purple part, for three in total. Some of the mutant parts are randomly offset in order to create more variation in the piece, as otherwise the parts would all overlap.
• Figure 4: Violin plots of the distributions for the cancer knowledge scores between groups A and B. The baseline scores for each group follow a similar distribution. Group B scored higher on average than Group A in the post-survey knowledge test (6.4 vs. 6.8); this is further reinforced by the larger average knowledge delta in Group B (0.92 vs. 1.92).
• Figure 5: An illustration of the timing question within the second study. a) is a screenshot of the question's interface, where participants can drag the colored markers to indicate the timestamps where the cancer and therapy started. There are buttons at the bottom to control the playback of the audio. b) describes the distribution of answers to this question. The x-axis is the difference between the actual start of the cancer / therapy and where participants marked the corresponding values.