The Dave Barry blog is an endless source of cultural stimulation. Here's a link from him to this article, about a subject of zero interest to me, namely DJs frigging about with CDs and gramophone records in order to entertained the zonked out raving masses. Zero interest until now:

PARIS (AFP) – Want to listen to something really different? Smear yoghurt on your favourite CD. Let it dry. Slide the disc into the player. Crank up the volume. And hear that music in a completely fresh, possibly spine-chilling way.

A joke right? Of course a joke. Otherwise Dave Barry's emailer fan club wouldn't have picked it up and sent it in. But serious also:

Jones' pet area of research is how signals can be transmitted through biological cells, which grow in a so-called "fractal" way, like tree branches.

He became intrigued by experimental musicians and DJs who, from the mid-1980s, sanded, varnished or even slapped paint onto CDs to create new sounds to sample.

Yes, that would explain quite a lot.

Music on CDs comes from tiny etched pits in the tracks that represent binary digits, the "0" or "1" that make up a computer code. The code, reflected back by the laser in the CD player, is then processed back into an electronic signal and converted to sound.

Mutilating the surface, so that some of the pits are missed, thus changes the sound.

You don't say. But this is where it gets more interesting.

But Jones found that much subtler sounds could be achieved using fungal or bacterial growth, rather than scraping or coating the disc's surface.

This is because these life forms introduce tiny errors, on a micron on nanoscale level rather than the far bigger millimetric scale.

In addition, the way fungus and bacteria can shape the sound in weird ways.

My guess is that various members of the slacker generation have already discovered this phenomenon, but didn't grasp its scientific significance.

Bacteria grow by cell division, while fungi grow by branching. Both processes can be controlled by adding malt extract to the disc as food.

Jones told New Scientist that he came across the discovery quite by accident, when he was DJing in his bar.

"I often change CDs when my hands are wet with beer," he told the British weekly. "One night I must have changed the CDs, touched the data surface, then left them for use on another night."

The following week, he put on a CD by Nine Inch Nails and found that it would not play properly because fungus had grown on it.

Don't you just hate it when that happens? Besides which, when did a CD by "Nine Inch Nails" ever "play properly"? But now I'm showing my culture.

But the fungus had not ruined the disc. …

Of course not. How could noises made by some nine inch nails be ruined? All they could ever be is different.

… The original audio sequence was there, but it would sometimes change in pitch and there were small staccato noises in the background.

And now the eureka moment.

He asked himself: "What would happen if I purposely grew fungi, yeast or bacteria in direct contact with the media, and manipulated their fractal dimensions?"

That's my question of the year so far.

Yoghurt-on-a-disc was born.

Jones says that he has yet to damage any of his discs or players with his pioneering work, but warns that the technique does crash CD players on computers because the software cannot cope.

Ah, the grand tradition of scientists pissing about and calling it research. "Head ache Jones?" "Yes sir. Rather too much fractal fungoid sonic analysis last night, sir." "Take it easy Jones, you're a valuable man." "Will do sir."

The internet will soon be awash with these noises, I think. Fungoid fractal sonics. I hate it already.

I just checked that the date is not April 1st. Unsurprisingly, it is not April 1st. It is September 13th. I mean, how could you make this story up?