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."

Re:CCCCCAGCAAGCCCA

[!coward]

I was actually a little disappointed when I heard the feed.. Hadn't expected it to be just a robotic reader spelling out the sequence.

Thought they might have just used the fact that three of the bases start with letters that are also musical notes in the english notation (A, C and G).. Choose a suitable 4th note for Thymine (maybe E, its last letter) and then run it through a midi sampler..

To spice it up, they could do some fun stuff with combinations, for example altering the tempo when you found repetitions of the same base, something for sharp/flat (just to mix it up a bit), etc..

Maybe not the point of this experiment (well, if you can call it that -- this isn't exactly science anyway), but as with the previous graphics experiment, it might even produce some interesting tune somewhere down the line.

As it is, though a nice code hack I'm sure, the result is a tad boring.

Re:This project is overrated.

[sneilan]

Well, this art definitely isn't worth much. It would be worth our time if it was interesting to look at or fun to listen to. I think that's the real hard part about this. If it were so easy to make something truly magnificient (that takes raw crap and makes something beautiful), then, maybe some of these people would get into galleries. This is more like it: http://www.tinywonderstudios.com/ [tinywonderstudios.com]

Staring at Hex Dumps

[Anonymous Coward]

Staring at that code reminds me of staring at binary executables converted to hex. You see all sorts of nonrandom structures that are obviously meaningful in some way, but you can't tell what's going on by looking at the whole thing. In my view, it's an indication that we are biomechanical things, and that that DNA sequence is a program for building one of us. The implication, though a little hard to face, is that we get conscious awareness for free as a side effect of the feedback loops in the design of our hardware, and that it'll stop when the hardware breaks.

Numbers Station

[Penguinshit]

It's the ultimate numbers station! [wikipedia.org]