Monday, January 20, 2003
If you read or maintain a blog, you already know how powerful this new medium of communication can be...AlterNet has an interesting take on the blogging phenomenon: "Gone to the Blogs."
This CNN article caught my imagination: medical researchers in Madrid, Spain are translating portions of the human genome into music. Quoting this morning's article:
...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. 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 obstinato. 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."
So perhaps, by extension, in some strange way, we're genetically attuned to respond to certain types of music; I've always thought that the near-universal human love of a strong beat comes from the primal impact of the heartbeat, the rhythms of breathing and walking, for example. Every culture has drums: drums of meeting, talking drums, drums of war.
