DNA & Sound Translating DNA into music

What is the history DNA music?



DNA music has been developed since the early 1970's when Geneticists found it easier to read the long strands of DNA code by assigning musical pitches to the 22 Amino Acids. This allowed them to compare DNA, look for mutations, and reverse engineer these tones back into proteins. This opened the way for more musical scientists to develop the system further until today where DNA music is now being taken very seriously by composers and musicians as a new form and medium of the music industry.



Prof. Susumu Ohno (of Beckman Research Institute of the City of Hope, who died on January 13, 2000, at the age of 71) proposed years ago that the repetition process governs both the musical composition and the DNA sequence construction . see this paper by Ohno in Immunogenetics (1986) titled: "The all pervasive principle of repetitious recurrence governs not only coding sequence construction but also human endeavor in musical composition".





[Video] DNA Music Lecture Video with David Deamer Professor of Chemistry, UC Santa Cruz

Dr. David W. Deamer is professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Deamer has a life-long interest in the relation between art and science, and was among the first to recognize that musical patterns could be translated from base sequences in DNA. He has collaborated with Susan Alexjander, a Santa Cruz musician/composer, in publishing several tapes and CDs of DNA music.



Regular patterns and sequences of notes exist throughout music, from the pitches of a scale to the rhythms of a song. The same goes for the building blocks of life. Patterns govern the way molecules fit together to construct a DNA molecule or a protein strand. When these patterns are "translated" into the patterns of music, some of them contain very interesting melodies and rhythms. DNA music is a new and unique way of experiencing the complexity of life.



