music – Yeung Research Group at UoB

CoCoMAD festival

This weekend we took our new hands-on outreach activities to CoCoMAD festival and it was a roaring success!

We had mineral specimens from the Lapworth museum, a growing ‘magic’ crystal tree, jigsaw puzzle nucleation, magnetic tile crystals, The Nucleation Game with live music and a giant interactive crystal that everyone got involved in helping to grow.

More information about the activities, including those you can do at home, can be found on our Outreach page.

Thanks to CoCoMAD for having us, to the CCDC and RSC for funding, to our musicians Pablo Sonnaillon and Tanguy Pocquet, to all our volunteers (Georgia, Thomas, Pat, Yomi, Sophie and Titas) and especially to our undergraduate summer interns Alice and Keyuan for developing all the activities and materials especially for the event!

News

Pint of Science 2024

Hamish gave a talk at the Pint of Science Festival 2024, at the Hop Garden in Harborne, entitled “Order from chaos – making crystals from molecular soup”. From the programme:

Crystals are all around us, from materials and rocks to medicines and technology. They are made up of atoms and molecules arranged in regular structures, that have specific properties and behaviour. But how do they form in the first place? This talk will take you on an atomic journey from the dynamic chaos of molecular soup to the beauty, order and function of crystalline materials.

Hamish’s talk also included audio analogies to different steps in the process of crystallisation, in the form of jazz music composed by collaborator Pablo Sonnaillon. It was great to receive several questions from the audience about it, perhaps the best being “If a crystal was a type of music, what would it be?”. Answers on a postcard please!

News, Opportunities

Outreach coming soon!

We recently hear the fantastic news that we’ve been awarded not one but two grants to produce and deliver public engagement / outreach activities! One is from the Cambridge Crystallographic Database Centre, the other is from the Royal Society of Chemistry. The activities will be in the form of activities, games and information about crystallisation, relating to our EPSRC project on MOF formation, and they will be appearing at events in Birmingham in summer 2024! It’s all very exciting but all we can say so as not to spoil the surprise is that some of the activities will be linked to a new piece of music that composer Pablo Sonnaillon has created for us…

If you’re interested in taking part, we’ll soon be looking to recruit a UoB undergraduate to help us design them, as well as a team of volunteers to deliver them at events in summer 2024!