Technology Review - Published By MIT
Log in to My.TechnologyReview.com | Register
Advertisement
 

Getting real about the life sciences, medicine and biological discovery.

View Complete Bio
Add RSS Feed XML

Making Music out of Genes

A UCLA graduate student creates melodies out of genetic and protein sequences, allowing us to "listen" to DNA.
Thursday, May 03, 2007

Listen to this.

It's the music created by the human protein thymidylate synthase A (ThyA). Really. At least, it's the notes created to "play" the music of this string of amino acids, with each amino acid assigned a chord.

Rie Takahashi, a graduate student at UCLA, dreamed up the idea of making music out of proteins when she read about a blind meteorology student at Cornell who converted the colors of a contoured weather map into tones corresponding to different hues.

Takahashi hopes her creation will help disabled geneticists "read" sequences using sound, she writes in a report in Genome Biology. "We wanted to be able to move away from a two-dimensional string of letters across a sheet of paper, and to see if adding another dimension--sound--would help," Takahashi told Nature.com.

Helping blind biologists "hear" DNA is laudable, but I'm also finding the notion of amino acids as chords strung together to be something eerie and wonderful, like putting my ear to a seashell and hearing the ocean. In addition, the idea makes sense, given that music is essentially digital--a series of precise calibrations of sound that the ancient Greeks thought of as a form of mathematics. For instance, the ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras developed "The Music of the Spheres" to describe the proportional movements of the planets, moon, and sun in what he believed to be whole-number ratios identical to musical intervals.

Checking out Takahashi's Gene2Music website, I discover that other musically inclined scientists have applied notes and sounds to biological activities, such as the functions of a cell. You really need to check out these strange, compelling tunes.

Takahashi's website also allows you to enter any amino-acid sequence and have it translated into music. Try it, and listen to the slightly dissonant but curiously soothing sounds of protein sequences that are in a sense singing.

Comments

  • Data into music
    lund1967 on 05/03/2007 at 2:31 PM
    Posts:
    5
    Avg Rating:
    2/5
    The idea of using raw data to create music is not new.  Check out "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams.
    Rate this comment: 12345
  • Take a number, and get in line...
    gabrielg01 on 05/03/2007 at 4:30 PM
    Posts:
    292
    Avg Rating:
    3/5
    This is in fact an old idea. And the blog is somewhat misleading, because it lets the reader believe that Rie Takahashi invented this concept. In fact, Takahashi's website clearly states that there were others who did this before her.

    First, I thought I was the first one to invent this, by assigning musical notes to amino acids (ha-ha). But I did my homework and did a background check. Well, there had been several people who did this a long time ago (in 1996). http://www.aber.ac.uk/~phiwww/pm/

    Since then several groups produced such biological music; check these sites:
    http://whozoo.org/mac/Music/Sources.htm
    http://www.toshima.ne.jp/~edogiku/index.html

    They also wrote programs, so that anyone can build such music: http://algoart.com/bio2midi.htm

    And if all you want is just to listen to some protein music, then just visit this page:
    http://whozoo.org/mac/Music/CD.htm

    Maybe people should do a proper Google search before claiming some new invention.

    Rate this comment: 12345
  • Been there, heard that...
    blunney on 05/04/2007 at 11:39 AM
    Posts:
    15
    Avg Rating:
    4/5
    My uncle, a chemistry professor with a handicapped student, started working on this problem back in 1977.  I remember visiting his lab back in the day, where an IR spectrometer was hooked up to some sort of computer that when fed the appropriate *punched paper tape program* (!) into its drive would produce weird and wonderful sounds derived from the spectra of organic molecules.  It probably helped that he was also a quite accomplished classical guitarist. 

    He went on to devote his career to helping disable students comprehend and participate in chemistry.  He told me one of his blind students achieved high accuracy in "reading" IR spectrometry data in a very short time using the setup described above.  I was enthralled to just be listening to the "music" of creation.

    Googling for results of his work only turn up MIDI files for the "aural" spectra of 1-propanol, ethanol, and some unspecified drugs.  Not DNA, to be sure, but it was a start.
    Rate this comment: 12345

Video

People-aware computing Tanzeem Choudhury demonstrates her wearable sensor platform and describes how software can analyze the data to provide valuable information.
35 Innovators under 35 Tesla Roadster* Mitch Kapor Protecting the Heart Intensifying the Sun
35 Innovators under 35
Tesla Roadster*
Mitch Kapor
Protecting the Heart
Intensifying the Sun
 
 
35 Innovators under 35
Advertisement

Current Issue

Technology Review September/October 2008
How Obama Really Did It
Social technology helped bring him to the brink of the presidency.
•  Subscribe
Save 41%
•  Table of Contents
•  MIT News

Magazine Services

Career Resources

MIT Technology Insider

Stories and breaking news from inside MIT about the latest research, innovations, and startups--in a convenient monthly e-newsletter. Subscribe today

Follow us on Twitter

Twitter

Get Technology Review updates via the web, cellphone, or Instant Messager – Follow techreview on Twitter!

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology