DNA-Radio, Tune In To Your Chromosomes

An anonymous reader writes "The folks behind the DNA-Rainbow project (discussed on Slashdot before) apparently have some time to play around with genome data. After creating amazing pictures from the human DNA code they are now transforming all chromosomes to audio and streaming them to the Internet. Every base is read and broadcasted instead converting it to a color. Seemingly this artistic project will last a while. After some math they found out that it will take them more than 23.5 years to air the whole human genome sequence."

Douglas Adams

[GrahamCox]

Douglas Adams (also DNA) used this idea in one of the Dirk Gently books - turning arbitrary data into beautiful audio. Then again he may have nicked it from Brian Eno, who was also talking about something similar in the 70s.

Re:Douglas Adams

[v1]

I was hoping they'd be playing some sort of music created from the sequences. listening to some monotone voice recite letters of the alphabet ad-nausium isn't going to attract anyone

Re:Douglas Adams

[clang_jangle]

Agreed, it's very disappointing. I guess samzenpus calling it an "artistic project" in TFS set me up to expect more. Wonder if he actually lisened to it? Here's a direct link [dna-rainbow.org] to the stream, for sam and whomever else wants to hear.

Re:Douglas Adams

[Amouth]

to be honest i was thinking the same thing.. after seeng some of the patterns in the image versions i was wondering if they where going to take either the individual pairs and match them with and instrament or have one modify the other or something - kinda like the network analyser that turns logs and box loads into clasical music..

if they did that and it was remotely nice to listen to.. i would have it book marked - but after 30seconds of that thing i will never touch it again except maybe to troll someone

DNA to Sound

[PoolOfThought]

I did a dna to sound project as a graduate student that actually played notes for a given chromosome. In fact I created an entire virtual orchestra (multiple machines) that were able to sync up and play from the same piece of sheet music (DNA). I don't remember exactly how I encoded the notes (If I recall the user was able to (1) select how many alleles should be in a note (2) the program would then break a given strand up according to the value entered (3) the user would choose the frequency to apply to each generated collection of alleles (4) the strand would be played. It didn't sound too bad. Kind of random, but not too bad. Definitely better than just reading them outloud.

The idea was that while LOOKING at the string ACTGGGAACCTTA a person may not see (consciously) anything of interest... not even repeated sequences of characters if they were sufficiently far apart... However, humans are VERY good at noticing patterns in sounds. So are animals. I won't get in to exactly what we were trying to accomplish at the time other than pattern recognition of good and bad DNA (for one purpose or another), but I will say that these folks should be able to create "music" if they wanted.

[Now I'm going to have to dig through the archives to see if I can find my program]

premise of Species movies

[peter303]

Scientist implant DNA sequence downloaded by SETI. They didnt understand it, but it turns out to be BAD. Thats how the evil aliens propagate themselves.