Well this one is a bit of a change of pace. It’s been sitting around but I finally feel like it’s in a state ready to be released. This wasn’t meant to push the boundaries or anything, or to be my best work yet; it was just meant to explore a new idea: what if I made a song based on an organic chemistry synthesis question? Every new element that’s introduced represents a certain functional group you attach to the base molecule, which I chose to be a benzene ring. An accompanying animation would show a benzene ring getting outfitted with all these cool new groups, all of which gave some sort of effect on the reactivity of the molecule. So below I have a reference image of a benzene ring for those who don’t know.

This is our starting reagent: 6 carbons, 6 hydrogens, and so much to work with. This is like a blank canvas, but in orgo. Anything is possible.

The beginning of the song is a simple 6 beat rhythm, one for each carbon of benzene. This beat will serve as a template for the rest of the song in the same way our friend benzene will.

So, why don’t we start off with a simple Friedel-Crafts alkylation, generating toluene. This molecule is very similar to just normal benzene so nothing much changes at 0:12 besides one extra note of the same instrument as we started with.

And so on:

0:23 - Nitration of the benzene ring

0:36 - Bromination

1:00 - Turning the bromine into a Grignard reagent (very reactive, hence the increase in tension)

1:12 - we react the Grignard to form an alcohol. This is much less reactive so we see a release in musical tension.

1:24 - NO2 becomes NH2 (I forgot the name of this one it’s been months)

1:36 - Formation of a diazonium ion (extremely reactive, so we see some huge increases in tension here)

1:48 - We react it with NaCN to bring cyanide to the molecule

2:00 - Remember that toluene from earlier? Well you can just turn any benzyllic carbon into a carboxylic acid, so that’s what I did. And the final climax after that is mostly there for musical purposes.

2:36 - The carboxylic acid is blown away via a decarboxylation, and you end up with whatever’s left.

I spent 44 hours on this project, which likely includes the time I spent mapping out the reactions I wanted to do. No joke, I literally drew a reaction pathway of what I wanted to happen before I even started working on this. The final molecule is probably not useful, but it is kinda cool that this song took us there.

Apologies for my horrible drawing skills.

Enjoy!