4 ms·

I'd love to get your feedback on a project I've been working on to 'sonify' DNA sequences. When played fairly quickly it sounds a lot like jazz to me, but I don

• odyssey7 4y ago
  Interesting project - you might be intrigued by algorithmic music composition. The link you shared sounds atonal to me. So, you could be thinking about free jazz. Here's a YouTube video that discusses it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WhXtkMyPHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WhXtkMyPHU
  • suoduandao2 4y ago
    Thanks! I'll check that out and see if it gives any insights.
• akomtu 4y ago
  A few ideas. DNA uses 20 codons, that could be 20 chords on piano. A sliding window of N codons can count the distinct codons and use that count as a pitch for the codon's chord.
  • suoduandao2 4y ago
    I agree that codons are probably the best basic unit to work off rather than base pairs or other units of organization. I'd say we agree on step one, I'd be interested in your feedback on how I approached steps two and three. Where I disagree with a lot of existing approaches is that given the decision to assign sounds on the basis of codons, most people assign them arbitrarily. I think that gets stuck in the postmodern dilemma, where everything is subjective so there's no basis to compare one system to another. So I wanted an approach that had logic in the loop somewhere, even if it had enough subjectivity that someone else following the same logic would come to a different conclusion. What I hit on is convergence of emotional associations. Individual neurotransmitters are associated with particular emotions, and also particular amino acids - therefore, one can assign emotions to a subset of codons. One can also assign emotions to musical elements, hence there's a basis for assigning sounds to codons in a non-arbitrary way, with emotional association acting as the cypher between the two languages. that's what I consider 'step two' of the process. My thinking is, someone could come up with a better logic (not using emotion as the common known element) or apply the same logic using different musical elements (assign different tones given the same emotional targets). Unfortunately, most people I asked from a music theory perspective didn't have much interest in suggesting different approaches here, so I had to work off my own subjective sense. If you've ideas what chords should be assigned to which codons, I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts there (or anyone who's into music and logic puzzles). Here's how I actually assigned them so people get an idea: I started with pentatonic scaling (G, C, A, B and D) and four major neurotransmitters (GABA, Serotonin, Dopamine, Acetylcholine) and assigned tones to the neurotransmitters based on which 'sounded' like the emotions those neurotransmitters give. So I started from a chart like this: GABA Gminor GAG 337hz GAA Serotonin Cminor UGG 370hz Dopamine Amajor UAC 440 Hz UAU Acetylcholine Bmajor OR Dmajor (Acetylcholine has two precursor amino acids rather than one) UCU 494 UCC UCA UCG AGU 587 AGC But even if one accepts the logic in step two, there's probably still better ways to assign sounds. I'd be interested in any suggestions from folks with more musical theory than myself. I don't understand your second suggestion - pitch of a particular chord would be determined by how much variation there is in pitch around it? Could you give an example of how it would work?