Study on Molecular Music: DNA Music

Abstract

We have investigated the audification of molecular information. The musical note information consists of a tone, a velocity and a type of a musical note. The sequence of this musical note information forms a musical score. In the present work, we have developed a computer program for the audification of gene. The DNA nucleotide sequence of a gene was employed for the audification. The program assigns the musical note information to each nucleotide using the transformation algorithm and then outputs the MIDI sequence as the musical score for a MIDI device. Several transformation algorithms were investigated as follows: (1) the simple mapping method that assigns notes to the DNA bases. (2) The unique mapping method that assigns the note information with the base usage on the sequence. (3) The musical-theory-based mapping method that is based on the musical theory to get a better musical score. For the third method, mapping the chord to the codon to form the bass line was employed too. It was observed that it is possible to get some advanced transformation from the DNA sequence to the musical score using the information derived from the base array.