An approach to building musical bioprocessors with Physarum polycephalum memristors

This chapter presents an account of our investigation into developing musical processing devices using biological components. Such work combines two vibrant areas of unconventional computing research: Physarum polycephalum and the memristor. P. polycephalum is a plasmodial slime mould that has been discovered to display behaviours that are consistent with that of the memristor: a hybrid memory and processing component. Within the chapter, we introduce the research’s background and our motives for undertaking the study. Then, we demonstrate P. polycephalum’s memristive abilities and present our approach to enabling its integration into analogue circuitry. Following on, we discuss different techniques for using P. polycephalum memristors to generate musical responses.