mike brannon sends me this article -- woww! i want that CD!



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Researchers translate DNA code into music
Tuesday, January 21, 2003 Posted: 10:21 AM EST (1521 GMT)


Composer Richard Krull, left, joined researchers Aurora Sanchez Sousa
and
Fernando Baquero in an interpretation of DNA code into easy listening
music.


MADRID, Spain (AP) -- Imagine the human genome as music. Unravel DNA's
double
helix, picture its components lined up like piano keys and assign a
note to
each. Run your finger along the keys.

Spanish scientists did that just for fun and recorded what they call
an audio
version of the blueprint for life.

The team at Madrid's Ramon y Cajal Hospital was intrigued by music's
lure --
how it can make toddlers dance and adults cry -- and looked for hints
in the
genetic material that makes us what we are. They also had some
microbial
genes wax melodic.

The end product is "Genoma Music," a 10-tune CD due out in February.
"It's a
way to bring science and music closer together," said Dr. Aurora
Sanchez
Sousa, a piano-playing microbiologist who specializes in fungi.

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is composed of long strings of
molecules
called nucleotides, which are distinguished by which of four
nitrogen-containing bases they contain: adenine, guanine, thymine or
cytosine, represented as A, G, T and C. These became the musical
notes.

French-born composer Richard Krull turned DNA sequences -- a snippet
of a
gene might look like AGCGTATACGAGT -- into sheet music. He arbitrarily
assigned tones of the eight-note, do-re-mi scale to each letter.
Thymine
became re, for instance. Guanine is so, adenine la and cytosine do.

It's all in the genes
Played solo on percussion, classical guitar or the other instruments
used on
the CD, the sequences would sound cute but rudimentary, the musical
equivalent of PacMan in an era of Microsoft Xbox.

So the alphabet soup of bases served as just that, base lines to
accompany
melodies composed by Krull and his scientific colleague. They say the
melodies were influenced, even dictated, by the mood and rhythm of the
underlying genetic code.





In general, the genome music is an easy-listening sound that is
vaguely New
Age. One of the prettiest songs is based on Connexin 26, a human gene
that
causes deafness when it mutates.

Another song draws on a yeast gene known as SLT2. Sanchez Sousa, the
main
author of the project, is fond of the sequence because it features a
stretch
in which one triplet of nitrogen bases appears several times in rapid
succession -- a repetitive phenomenon that has a musical equivalent
called
ostinato.

She declined to discuss marketing plans for the CD. She said she's
circulated
it only among academics so far, and psychologists in particular find
it
relaxing.

Her team's plans for future music include having the hospital choir
sing a
vocal piece based on DNA from a bacteria.

Seeking music in nature goes way back. In the 6th century B.C., the
Greek
philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras argued that celestial bodies
in
rotation gave off pitched sounds that blended into a beautiful harmony
he
called "the music of the spheres."

The idea is that matter and its behavior -- wheat fields shimmering
and
tongues of fire dancing -- may hold something intrinsic that can be
transformed into music, said Dr. Fernando Baquero, head of
microbiology at
Ramon y Cajal Hospital.

Maybe that's why people like music: It's already inside them anyway,
so
hearing it touches a piece of them, Baquero said.

"When we like something, it is because we recognize it," he said.
"It's
funny, but to like is to recognize."