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A Musical Score for Disease

Converting genetic activity into music may be a way to monitor health.

By Jennifer Chu

Friday, July 18, 2008

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When set to music, colon cancer sounds kind of eerie. That's the finding of Gil Alterovitz, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School who is developing a computer program that translates protein and gene expression into music. In his acoustic translation, harmony represents good health, and discord indicates disease.

Connecting the dots: A Harvard researcher has translated genes (circles) into music by charting the relationship (lines) between them and determining key networks (red nodes). Each network is assigned a musical note.
Credit: Gil Alterovitz
Multimedia
video  Listen to examples of gene-based music.

At any given time in each of our cells, thousands of genes are churning out their molecular products while thousands more lie senescent. The profile of which genes are on versus off is constantly changing--with specific diseases such as cancer, for example.

Searching for a more simplified way to represent the complex library of information inherent in gene expression, Alterovitz decided to represent those changes with music. He hopes that doctors will one day be able to use his music to detect health-related changes in gene expression early via a musical slip into discord, potentially improving a patient's outcome.

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The first step in the gene-to-sound conversion was to pare down multiple measurements to a few fundamental signals, each of which could be represented by a different note. Together, the notes would form a harmonic chord in normal, healthy states and become increasingly out of tune as key physiological signs go awry, signaling disease.

Alterovitz employed mathematical modeling to determine relationships between physiological signals. Much like the various systems in an automobile, many physiological signs work in synchrony to keep a body healthy. "These signals [are] not isolated parts," says Alterovitz. "Like in a car, one gear is working with other gears to control, for example, power steering. Similarly, there are lots of correlations between physiological variables. If heart rate is higher, other variables will move together in response, and you can simplify that redundancy and information."

Comments

  • sigh...here we go again
    This is all quite wonderful, and I think that this technology will do great things, but I have a "fundamental" (pun intended) problem with the interpretation of what sound is considered harmonious, and inharmonious. In the healthy example, we have notes represented from the harmonic series, yet what is odd is that the interval of a fourth is used (as the last high note in each phrase)- which was considered very dissonant in early music and avoided. Also odd, is that the Perfect fourth doesn't really naturally occur until a rather vast distance in the natural harmonic series (at least four octaves apart). If one hears it with any less distance, the ear tends to flip the root note to the upper of the two in the fourth. Your "healthy" musical example has it less than four octaves apart- so you might want to adjust that, if you really want "consonance" to be represented here. In the second example (which represented the distorted cancer nodes) "inharmonious" sounds were primarily a fully diminished seventh chord, which consists of symmetrical minor thirds stacked on top of each other .These notes do occur naturally in the harmonic series (although with a different spacing), but it seems to smack of the old (and now tired) way of thinking: "Arnold Schönberg's music can cause cancer because of the dissonances" (this was actually claimed early on). Yet we are in the 21st Century, and a lot of music is now, according to your definition, inharmonious. I think it would be a better choice to use various forms of noise/distortion/modulation to better illustrate the cancer cell's "distortion" of health.  According to your definitions a great deal of music written after 1800 is inharmonious, and should be looked at in the same way you unintentionally present it: as a bad thing. I'm sorry, but that is just wrong, and sad to me (as a composer of many kinds of music)- but its an attitude that can be easily fixed.
    Rate this comment: 12345

    istvanpeterb...
    07/19/2008
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    • Re: sigh...here we go again
      I was thinking the same thing, but it seems at this stage, the proof of concept is pretty great at least.

      To phrase your question another way, what would it mean to you as a patient if your oncologist is, say, Indian? Sure, you'd avoid the battle between Mozart and Schoenberg but you'd be smack in the middle of a much stranger battle between ideas of western harmony and eastern harmony. If this technology takes hold, it would necessitate the dicy process of translating music that's appealing, or not appealing, to ears raised on different kinds of music.
      Rate this comment: 12345

      akwhitacre
      07/19/2008
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  • Question
    So, which disease sounds like rap music? :))
    Rate this comment: 12345

    gabrielg01
    07/20/2008
    Posts:418
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    3/5
  • Detecting the change
    Whether it sound good or bad is certainly subjective and therefore a problem, but what really kills this concept in my mind is - who is going to want to listen to this constantly waiting for a change?  Just listening to the demo track I became bored very quickly.  And if changes were subtle enough over a long period of time, would our brain recognize the change or simply adapt to the new tune believing it to be the same?
    Rate this comment: 12345

    ebonfyre
    07/21/2008
    Posts:6
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  • relation
    Okay, so fully diminished doesn't sound nice, thus the connection is quite clear, but I'd say that without any relative harmony, it sounds bad and becomes worse the more you repeat it. What if this repetition is a translation of repeated stress, either physically or emotionally, causing a dominance of this harmony. I myself am a jazz pianist, and I very much like diminished, but only as a precursor to resolving it with a different, preferably major chord.
    Rate this comment: 12345

    rubenstolp
    07/21/2009
    Posts:1

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