Genomic Music Related Sites
Algorithmic Arts Genetic Music
National Center For Biological Information
NDB Musical Atlas
MIDI Music From DNA, Proteins, and Math
Genetic Music
An Intro to Quantum Computation
Imagine that you are on atop one of the rocky mountain facing the Mongolia's grassland. Your first impression is of an unalloyed silence as vast as the land itself. Theodore C Levin and Michael E. Edgerton, in their article entitled "The Throat Singers of Tuva", wrote:
"Gradually the ear habituates to the absence of human activity. Silence dissolves into a subtle symphony of buzzing, bleating, burbling, cheeping, whistling - the onomatopoeic shorthand for the sounds of insects, beasts, birds, water and wind. The polyphony unfolds slowly, its colors and rhythms by turns damped and reverberant as they wash over the land's shifting contours." "…far from overwhelmingly human activities this place is like a living record of a proto-musical world, where natural and human-made sounds blend."
Imagine that genes are musical. When you read a genetic sequences, what you can see is a series of musical notes. Image that every single note carries a message of life - from chemical reactions to a disease entity. Eventually, you realized that life is like a living record of a musical world, where all natural life-elated events are stored in the genome as musical notes.
There are two forms of proto-music: instrumental and vocal. Humankind learned to play proto-music instrument long ago (Guzheng and bianzhong: ancient Chinese music instruments, 545 and 550 B.C.). The very first instrumental proto-music sought to duplicate natural sounds whose timbres, or tonal colors, are rich in harmonics, such as water gurgling and winds swishing. Similarly, the first vocal proto-music, Khoomei or khoomii (throat-singing), which is also called overtone singing, harmonic singing or harmonic chant, had the same purpose. The proto-music is intimately connected to an ancient tradition of animism, the belief that natural objects and phenomena have souls or be inhabited by spirits. Thus, the spirituality of mountains and rivers is manifested not only through their physical shape and location but also through the sounds they produce.
In contrast, genes were known for less than four decades, but it has evolved on Earth for millions of years. To every life form, from virus to the human, it is closely connected to the evolutionary events of the geochemical cycles on Earth. It was first evolved, and it did so in a context defined by its physical and chemical surroundings. It has been altered fundamentally by geochemical cycles operating near Earth's surface. Because the genome records evolutionary triumphs, grotesqueries and catastrophes, and major evolutionary events left their footprints inside the genome, it is expected that the genome is a proto-music of life, called Genomic Music.
Similarities are obvious between proto-music and the Genome. For example, the lowest fundamental in operatic repertoire, is a low C note whose conventional frequency is 65.4 hertz; its harmonics are 130.8 hertz, 196.2 hertz and so on, in the proto-music. The strength of the harmonics diminishes as their frequencies rise, such that the loudness falls by 12 decibels (a factor of roughly 16 in sonic energy) with each higher octave (a factor of two in pitch). Theoretically, a throat-singer could use 16 music notes in which harmonic numbers 6 to 13 are frequently used. Similarly, twenty distinct notes, called amino acids, simultaneously express the genomic music. Among which, there are two classes of amino acid in the genome. One with the terminal hydroxy- or amino- groups, sustained fundamental oxidative-reductive properties, and the other with carbohydrate chains, determines the solubility of the gene products. The genome, like a complicated music "string" such as Guzheng, is a composite of a series of fundamental "notes". It is obvious that genomic music is different from the proto-music in many aspects.
