ScienceRoll reported today on the Genetic Music Project, an open-source art piece created by graduate student Alexandra Pajak. The Genetic Music Project creates music based on genetic sequences. Ways to translate genes into music range from the simple (say, assigning a single note to each nucleotide, resulting in a song comprised of 4 notes) to the complex, as the website explains:
Some of the fun ways I think this could be expanded would be to take on two characteristics delineated in the genetic markers, assign different instruments to each gene marker and different notes to the nucleotides within each genetic marker and then play them in parallel. In that way you can have multiple instruments, and more than just four notes. Indeed, since all life is based on the combination of different four-note codes on top of other four-note codes the combinations approach infinity.
Disregarding the aesthetic quality of the musical outcome - which, like all art, is subjective - the project highlights the complex beauty of the human genome and its potential, even at its scariest.
