bnevin@cch.bbn.com (04/15/88)
From: "Bruce E. Nevin" <bnevin@cch.bbn.com>
Anyone have a reference I can follow up for this intriguing story?
January 1988 (AP) Bored with tedious mathematical equations, a
Japanese geneticist, Susumu Ohno, decided to convert the genetic
patterns of living cells into musical notation. He thought that
listening to genetic codes, rather than staring at them, would
make _patterns_ easier to detect. In this process he discovered
that genes not only carry the blueprint of life, they also carry a
tune.
Translated into sheet music, a portion of mouse ribonucleic acid
sounds like a lively waltz, very similar to Chopin's Nocturne,
Opus 55, No. 1. The notes derived from the genetic codes are
_not_ just random notes that some geneticists predicted [sic], but
genuine music of the Baroque and Romantic eras, with an uncanny
similarity to the works of great composers.
Interestingly, the musical score derived from cancer cells sounds
very somber, while the musical coding of the gene that gives
transparency to the eye is filled with trills and flourishes, and
is airy and light. Mr. Ohno said, "What I think is at work here
are underlying principles that govern the structure of many
things--a gene, a birdsong, a musical composition."
What does this suggest about human pattern recognition, searching
strategies, and matrix interface design?
Bruce Nevin (bn@cch.bbn.com)mike@MEDIA-LAB.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (04/15/88)
From: Michael Hawley <mike@MEDIA-LAB.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> It gives testimonial to our ability to find interesting things in oddball patterns. It turns out that many data streams sound interesting when hammered out as music. e.g., playing straight ascii text on a synthesizer sounds interesting because letter frequencies in the source language color and define the tonality of the "music" that results. I've heard Ohno's genetic Chopin, and my immediated impression was, he was using a pretty sophisticated strategy to map genetic sequences to 10-finger melody+accompaniment piano scores. I would suspect that Zipf's law (re: how so many human information- organizing tasks exhibit 1/n-like frequency distributions) is closer to the point than some kind of eternal golden braid that ties together birdsongs, genes, and music. Composers are certainly allowed to take inspiration from all over, and they do, so it should not be surprising to find that musical sequences often bear a certain resemblance to other natural phenomena. One very valuable aspect for scientific work is that, just as visualizing data on good graphical workstations is a powerful discovery tool, so is listening to it.