Science Café: Music & String Theory (Aug 2025)

Science Centre Singapore's Aug 2025 Science Café brought together a string theory expert and an award-winning composer to discuss the surprising connections between string theory and music.

Photo collage created in Canva by Jamie Uy featuring (left) Assoc. Prof. Tan Meng-Chwan and (right) Dr. Joyce Koh Beetuan. Image sources: Lydia Konig, NASA, NUS Physics Assoc. Prof. Tan Faculty Profile, Wikipedia, Dr. Koh's Instagram, Wikimedia Commons.

Music and physics may conjure up very different images—pianos versus, say, atoms—but both disciplines share a fascination with vibrations, frequencies, patterns, scales, and time. Even the ancient Greeks were obsessed with cosmic harmonies. An aphorism attributed to Pythagoras states, "There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres." 

To celebrate the interdisciplinary connections between science and the arts, Science Centre Singapore hosted a Science Café session on Music & String Theory in collaboration with Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) and the University of the Arts Singapore (UAS) at the NAFA-UAS Co.Learning.Space on Friday 22 August 2025 evening. 

The event featured two speakers, string theory expert Associate Professor Tan Meng-Chwan from the National University of Singapore (Assistant Dean, Outreach and Admissions, and Head of the NUS String Theory Group) and award-winning composer Dr. Joyce Koh Beetuan from NAFA, UAS (Associate Dean, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Associate Dean, Technology and Sustainability Research, Research Division).

Attendees enjoyed a buffet dinner and drinks while listening to thought-provoking talks on string theory and its resonances in music.

Signage directing attendees to Co.Learning.Space for Science Café: Music and String Theory.

Attendees partaking in a buffet dinner spread.

The session began with fun audience icebreakers led by Science Centre Singapore staff. A game of string theory bingo included phrases like "loop", "rhythm", "space-time", “wormhole”, "Stranger Things", and "Marvel", encouraging attendees to draw associations between music, popular culture, and quantum physics.

A game of string theory bingo.

While string theory may sound very esoteric, you've probably been exposed to popular media premised on string theory concepts. Several recent Hollywood films have taken inspiration from string theory's suggestion that multiple universes exist, from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse to Everything Everywhere All At Once and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. 

One of the most striking examples is a scene from Interstellar where NASA pilot Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) falls through a black hole and ends up in a tesseract, a strange library-like structure created by advanced beings to represent five dimensions. Using the strings of time, Cooper is able to manipulate the tesseract to communicate with his daughter, scientist Murphy Cooper (Bryce Dallas Howard), throughout various periods of her life back on Earth. Higher dimensions and mind-bending geometries are just a few tantalising ideas from string theory that have been spotlighted in popular culture, albeit in highly speculative ways.

Building on the icebreakers referencing string theory in popular culture, Assoc. Prof. Tan's talk "String Theory: A Flash Introduction" provided attendees a quick crash course in why string theory matters. Assoc. Prof. Tan described how the standard model of particle physics accounts for the behaviour of subatomic particles and fundamental forces except gravity. He explained, "therefore to understand the origin of the universe, we will need a unified theory of gravity and the standard model of the quantum world," which is where string theory comes in.

Assoc. Prof. Tan presenting his talk "String Theory: A Flash Introduction".

Assoc. Prof. Tan performed a simple demonstration, holding a line representing a string drawn on a piece of paper at a distance to model to the audience how "a very, very short string will look like a point particle" from afar. He explained that "each vibration of the string results in a point particle, [so] one string gives rise to infinitely many fermion (matter) and boson (force) particles.” In string theory, the graviton, a hypothetical elementary particle that mediates "the force of gravity between matter" is "realised by the lowest energy vibration of a closed string," potentially providing a quantum theory for gravity.

Furthermore, Assoc. Prof. Tan described how string theory supports the concept of a multiverse, with different physical laws in each universe. String theory postulates that “our universe is actually 10-dimensional” with the "extra dimensions curled up" in a complex, minute shape called a Calabi-Yau manifold. The shapes of extra dimensions influence the properties of particles and forces in our universe.

A graphic representation of a Calabi-Yau manifold. Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the absence of experimental results, novel mathematics like the equations behind the Calabi-Yau manifold serves as the primary tool for verifying string theory. Assoc. Prof. Tan explained “[strings are] therefore very difficult to detect [experimentally], as you need huge amounts of energy to smash the quarks into their smaller, constituent strings.” To illustrate the minute scale of these strings, he pointed out that “the size of a superstring is as much smaller than the atom as the atom is smaller than the size of the solar system!”

Figure 4. The dimensions of the Universe from extremely small (right part) to unthinkably large (left part), with humans seemingly in the middle. Meijer, Dirk. (2014). The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System: John Wheeler’s World Revisited. NeuroQuantology. 13. 10.14704/nq.2015.13.1.798.

While Assoc. Prof. Tan explored the theoretical foundations of string theory from a scientist's point of a view, Dr. Joyce Koh Beetuan's talk “In Search of the Music of String Theory” walked attendees through her creative process translating scientific theories into sound as a musician. She discussed her early inspirations from science writing, such as The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene and a 2002 article in Astronomy by Edward Witten, which prompted her to wonder whether she could bring the strings of string theory to life through the strings of musical instruments like violins.

Dr. Joyce Koh presenting her talk, "In Search of the Music of String Theory".

Dr. Koh drew analogies between how vibrations in string theory produce different elementary particles like electrons, photons, and neutrinos, and how vibrations in musical instruments produce harmonics. To demonstrate this, Dr. Koh asked one of the attendees carrying her violin to play a few notes.

Dr. Joyce Koh and an attendee demonstrating harmonics through an impromptu violin performance.

Using this analogy as the basis for her 2010 multimedia production, On the String, Dr. Koh set out to imagine what “the music of the universe” might sound like if “we could hear the sounds of these tiny strings of energy.” Participants were treated to a short video snippet from On the String, “a live music performance by 16 musicians, including the pipa and harpsichord, and two new interactive sound sculptures.” 

Dr. Koh shared behind-the-scenes content from the production, from brainstorming notes relating the levels of magnification in the modern atom model to the various movements of the multimedia work, to early concept sketches of the large sound sculptures, and experimentations with synthesising sounds using computer simulations of theoretical strings made of various materials from titanium, steel, plastic, and glass. 

As the presentations concluded, the evening's conversations were far from over. Attendees networked and mingled after the talks, connecting with other science enthusiasts. The Science Café provided participants an opportunity to ponder the origins of the universe and music’s role in transmitting the movements of the firmaments.

Although string theory remains an incomplete framework for unifying physics awaiting further technological advancements and verification, it remains a compelling Theory of Everything pushing us to reimagine how we make sense of the cosmos. 

The Quantum Café–Sip, Chat, and Compute

Want to continue exploring the quantum realm? Join us at Science Café: Quantum Computing on Friday 10 October 2025 for a buffet dinner, drinks, and mind-boggling conversations at the Quanta School exhibition, Level 2, Science Centre Singapore. Bring your curiosity and find out our speakers’ (super)position on quantum computing. Hear from scientists discovering the world of qubits and quantum algorithms. Where’s the future of computing headed? Find out more event details in the poster below. Tickets are available now here: https://www.science.edu.sg/whats-on/workshops-activities/science-cafe/the-quantum-caf%C3%A9-sip--chat--and-compute.

Written by Jamie Uy
Photos by Lydia Konig

Published 29 September 2025