Music may not be your first thought when considering nanotechnology but scientists will fearlessly (or so it seems) explore anything. It's one of the reasons we fear and revere them.

Radio

Researchers have created a carbon nanotube radio which includes all the major components of an antenna, tuner, amplifier, and demodulator. You can hear (under Leaving the mysteries, click on Nanotube radio) the 'carbon nanotube' radio play Layla, Good Vibrations, Largo, and the Star Wars theme. Made from a single carbon nanotube, the radio is thousands of times smaller than the diametre of a human hair. Future applications could include radio-controlled medical devices that can be transported through human bloodstreams or smaller cell phones, according to the researchers of the Zettl Research Group, Condensed Matter Physics, Dept. of Physics, University of California at Berkeley.^[1]

Growing Wire

After testing Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water', Chopin's 'Nocturne Opus 9 no. 1', Josh Abraham's 'Addicted to Bass', Rammstein's 'Das Model', and Abba's 'Dancing Queen', David Parlevliet found that music can be used to grow nanowires but they will be kinky.

Scientists want to grow straight nanowires and one of the popular methods is to "[blast] a voltage through silane gas to produce a plasma that pulses on and off at 1000 times a second. Over time the process enables molecules from the gas to deposit on a glass slide in the form of a mesh of crystalline silicon nanowires."^[2]

Parlevliet, a PhD student at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, plugged in a music player instead of a pulse generator usually used for this purpose and observed the results. While there are no current applications for kinky nanowires, the Deep Purple music created the densest mesh. Rammstein's music grew nanowires the least successfully. In his presentation to the Australian Research Council Nanotechnology Network Symposium in March 2008, Parlevliet concluded that music could become more important for growing nanowires if applications can be found for the kinky ones.^[3]

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Nanotube radio