November 14, 2002
Science Groove
Do Peterson’s biostatistics dissertation starts out with folk, progresses to bluegrass and continues on through funk, disco, jazz and rock ‘n’ roll.
So Peterson, a Ph.D. program dropout, isn’t your average scholar, or your average artist for that matter. Rather, the UW research scientist combines his right- and left-brain passions to achieve balance, happiness, and one decidedly eclectic blend of science and music on Science Groove’s debut album, My Dissertation.
Peterson formed the band out of his desire to bring science to a broader audience through the arts. Someday he hopes to broaden Science Groove (http://science-groove.org) to include visual arts and multi-media, all in an effort to make science more accessible to more people.
“I was working on this dissertation and I knew that the only people who were going to read this thing were going to be my committee members and maybe one or two people down the line – maybe,” he said. “There’s the story about the person who wrote a dissertation and stuck a $100 bill in it and put it back on the shelf in the library. Twenty years later he came back and the $100 bill was still in it. It might be folklore, but everybody knows that your dissertation just doesn’t get read. I didn’t want that for what I had worked on.”
The collection of recordings draws inspiration from a 13-slide, 15-minute talk he gave to a group of physicians at a cardiovascular health conference about a year and a half ago.
“A friend of mine said, ‘Hey, why don’t you turn it into 13 songs?’ And I was just at the point where I was in the mood to do that kind of thing. I was so angry at her,” Peterson recalled, laughing at the memory. “I said, ‘You don’t understand how interesting that sounds to me.’ ”
Interesting enough that Peterson decided to drop his pursuit of a Ph.D., find a job so that he could stay near the friends he had developed in Seattle, and put his science to music. He wrote the songs and started looking for other musicians to complete the band.
He didn’t have to look far. Including Peterson there are nine band members with ties to the UW. Most come from science backgrounds or are English language teachers in UW Extension – where Peterson’s partner and Science Groove member Lori DeGloria works. The close-knit group began playing gigs over the summer and continues to practice together once a week.
“They’re just my friends,” Peterson said. “It’s an excuse to get together and have a party in my basement once a week with people I like. That’s really fun.”
But the science really does drive the music. The lyrics are all science and the album’s first song, “Performance,” reads something like an abstract for the rest of the project.
Done a lot of work to get this far.
The knowledge I’ve gained has come so hard.
Six long years of sweat and heart,
I take this work and create art.
It wasn’t always that way. Peterson tried to make a go of it as a professional musician. He found plenty of work, but the lifestyle proved to be too stressful – scurrying about to find his next gig, working odd hours, dealing with bounced paychecks. And even worse, he found his inspiration waning.
“Once I got out of college I thought I would really feel fulfilled by being an artist and doing music,” Peterson said. “What I found out, much to my surprise, was that doing music doesn’t really inspire me. It’s living life that inspires me. After awhile I was doing so much music because I needed to make a living and finally it was like, ‘Where is the inspiration coming from?’ I felt like I was dipping from a very dry well.
“I guess the balance is really important. Balance between work that I find to be very interesting and then music or any art form to express it in a way that I think people might listen to. So, now at the age of 36, I feel like I finally have my act together.”
Peterson’s adviser in the biostatistics program wasn’t surprised to see Science Groove take shape. Barbara McKnight says Peterson showed an interest in using the arts to express his science from the start and he never wavered.
“Do has a certain maturity and direction about himself,” she said. “He didn’t let himself be swayed by what other people thought his direction should be. He knew what it was. He’s a really neat guy and fun to be around.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s also off the charts in the department when it comes to creativity, according to McKnight. Peterson learned early on that creativity could help him do more than make music.
Working full time as a musician taught him that people who might otherwise be uninterested would actually pay money to listen to his message, to any message, if it’s put to music. So when friends tell him that their child won’t stop listening to ASP – a funky Science Groove song about affected sibling pairs, distribution theory and linkage analysis data – it reinforces what he’s long suspected.
“Maybe he doesn’t know what he’s listening to,” Peterson said about the child, “but it’s a pleasant atmosphere in which to be introduced to the vocabulary of science and it’s a pleasant association with the material.”
Science Groove will be playing songs from the first album along with some new material Nov. 17 at the Rendezvous, 2320 Second Ave. in Belltown. The inspiration for the new songs is keyboardist Greg Crowther’s physiology dissertation. The music, like on the first album, will be wide ranging, but, according to Peterson, not the same wide range.
