"Thousands of hairs /Two eyes only /Its you /Some skin /Billions of genes /Again its you /XX XY /That's why it's you and me /Your blood is red /It's beautiful genetic love /Biological I don't know why I feel that way with you /Biological I need your DNA /Your fingerprints /The flesh, her arm, your bones /I'd like to know /Why all these things move me /Let's use ourselves to be as one tonight /Apart of me would like to travel in your veins /Biological I don't know why I feel that way with you /Biological I need your DNA ("Biological", Air).
Que louco. Seu código genético é uma partitura musical! Olha só:
DNA Music
Think you have no musical talent? Think again, your DNA code is a whole orchestra of sounds!
These days music is everywhere with soundtracks in shops, airports and cafes. It sometimes seems as though the entire world has been turned into one giant jukebox. But what if there is music inside you as well? Not that you have hidden talent, but music actually hard-wired into the composition of your body? A British computational biologist, Dr Ross King, has explored this weird idea with Protein Music – a program that converts DNA code, into music.
These days music is everywhere with soundtracks in shops, airports and cafes. It sometimes seems as though the entire world has been turned into one giant jukebox. But what if there is music inside you as well? Not that you have hidden talent, but music actually hard-wired into the composition of your body? A British computational biologist, Dr Ross King, has explored this weird idea with Protein Music – a program that converts DNA code, into music.
The idea of ‘music-in-nature’ has a long history. The ancient Greeks imagined ‘the music of the spheres’ – harmonious sounds produced by the grinding of nested ‘cosmic balls’ that constituted the universe. The French composer Olivier Messiaen famously spent hours painstakingly transcribing birdsong into musical notation, then reusing it in his scores. And the sonic experiments of John Cage proposed that any sound, no matter how random or trivial, could be understood as ‘music’.
More recently there has been a flurry of interdisciplinary interest in translating biological and molecular information into musical form – the peaks and troughs of an EKG graph, the structure of proteins, and the sequences of DNA itself.
Dr Ross King originally developed his Protein Music software in collaboration with electronic musician Colin Angus of The Shamen. ‘I knew Colin Angus from university, where he studied microbiology’, King explains. This resulted in the song S2 Translation on the Shamen album Axis-Mutandis, an ode to a protein that, according to Angus, ‘is thus one of the most important molecules in the mediation of both ordinary and non-ordinary (or ‘shamanic’) states of consciousness’.
To download Protein Music and listen to its example gene sequence is an eerie and fascinating experience. The music is spare, minimalist and hypnotic. But it is also hard to shake the sense that it encodes precious information. King explains how programming decisions were made so as to translate DNA into something musically comprehensible. ‘The mapping makes some biological sense, it's not completely arbitrary’, he says. ‘You start with the DNA sequence, which has four letters: A, G, C and T. These map on to four notes in the C major scale’.
That alone would be boring to listen to, so a biologically relevant bassline is added. ‘DNA codes for 20 different amino acids’, King says. ‘You don't want to map them straight on to notes, so we map the chemical and physical properties – some have negative charge, some have positive charge, some are bigger, some are smaller, and so on. These become the notes in the bassline’.
King considers the value of his work to be in auralisation: an educational way of re-presenting information sonically so that its structure can be apprehended more intuitively. ‘I have a student doing a project right now on more general ways of transforming information into sound’, he says. And while he resists the excitable notion that Protein Music somehow demonstrates the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, other researchers in the field have noticed odd similarities.
A mathematical pattern called 1/f noise, for example, seems to be mysteriously ubiquitous not only in DNA sequences and the rhythm of a heartbeat, but also in music, written language and the flow of traffic. Meanwhile, researchers Susumu Ohno and Midori Ohno suggested in an article in Immunogenetics that a ‘principle of repetitious recurrence’ governs both the DNA sequence and the process of musical composition, and even that works of music could be translated into DNA code themselves. Perhaps the music of the spheres really is inside every living thing.
("Culture Lab"/The British Council) Writer: Steven Poole. Published on 03 April 2003.
E aí? Qual música é você?
Eu queria ser "Disintegration", do Cure....
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