University of Virginia professor of chemical engineeringRoseanne M. Fordis set to test an idea she's been casually mulling for more than a decade: setting the dance of bacteria to music. The notion came from an image in a textbook. The movement of bacteria under a microscope, plotted on paper with data points, took the shape of a ballerina. The “dancer†stuck with Ford until it eventually led to a collaboration withMaxwell Tfirn, director of composition and creative studies at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. Tfirn has master's and Ph.D. degrees in composition and computer technology from UVA. Ford and Tfirn have received a National Science Foundation Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award to fund “Exploring beyond visualization: Data sonification of bacterial chemotaxis patterns.†The EAGER program is designed for untested but potentially transformative research approaches. Ford and Tfirn's project proposes to use sound as an alternate way to analyze scientific data. They plan to use Ford's lab experiments to demonstrate the concept of sonification, the process of mapping information to sound to detect recognizable patterns.