Artist as Scientist: The Sonification of DNA (original) (raw)
DNA sonification for public engagement in bioinformatics
BMC Research Notes, 2021
Objective Visualisation methods, primarily color-coded representation of sequence data, have been a predominant means of representation of DNA data. Algorithmic conversion of DNA sequence data to sound—sonification—represents an alternative means of representation that uses a different range of human sensory perception. We propose that sonification has value for public engagement with DNA sequence information because it has potential to be entertaining as well as informative. We conduct preliminary work to explore the potential of DNA sequence sonification in public engagement with bioinformatics. We apply a simple sonification technique for DNA, in which each DNA base is represented by a specific note. Additionally, a beat may be added to indicate codon boundaries or for musical effect. We report a brief analysis from public engagement events we conducted that featured this method of sonification. Results We report on use of DNA sequence sonification at two public events. Sonificat...
A Physiological Approach to DNA Music
2001
As a consequence of the Human Genome Project, there has been an explosion of primary DNA sequencing data available on the internet. Five years ago, we envisioned a type of computer-generated music that would take cues for its musical parameters directly from the physiological ones present in DNA. The first paper, Musical Synthesis of DNA Sequences, was presented and published at the Sixth International Symposium on Electronic Art, 1995 in Montreal; and XI Colloquio di Informatica Musicale, 1995 in Bologna. This updates our recent work.
Life Music: The Sonification of Proteins
Leonardo, 1999
An artist and a biologist have collaborated on the sonification of protein data to produce the audio compact disc Life Music. Here they describe the process by which this collaboration merges scientific knowledge and artistic expression to produce soundscapes from the basic building blocks of life. The soundscapes may be encountered as aesthetic experiences, as scientific inquiries or as both. The authors describe the rationale both for the artistic use of science and for the scientific use of art from the separate viewpoints of artist and scientist.
DNA as a Work of Art: Processes of Semiosis between Contemporary Art and Biology
International Journal of Art & Design Education, 2013
When A Genomic Portrait – Sir John Sulston by Mark Quinn appeared in the London National Portrait Gallery's exhibition in 2001/2, the ensuing public controversy over its portrayal raised a number of questions about the representation of a publicly known figure. Because the portrait was the Gallery's first contemporary commission using specialised, scientific procedures in its creation, a number of issues arose surrounding its authenticity. How questions of authenticity are answered depends upon how the viewer reads aspects of scientific coding as it functions within the artistic domain. This is a form of visual literacy that depends on the viewer's ability to lift the veil that operates between coding systems and the context of their use. Literacy in this case is built upon the relationship between visual interpretation and ascribed systems of meaning within the context of their recontextualisations. By playing with the intersections between artistic and scientific discourses, the authors investigate how the representation of identity functions as a polysemy across different semiotic domains. Using visual semiotics to examine the intersections between sign systems across these domains, some of the communication aspects of how new modes of art function in present-day communities are provoked. By illustrating the complexity of this process as a part of transforming expert knowing into pedagogical practice, support is given for improving teacher education in the arts and cultural domain.
Image-Problem? Medienkunst und Performance im Kontext der Bilddiskussion, 2006
In the past two decades, the sonification of scientific data – an auditory equivalent of data visualization in which data are turned into sounds – has become increasingly widespread, particularly as an artistic practice and as a means of popularizing science. Sonification is thus part of the recent trend, discussed in public understanding of science literature, towards increased emphasis on ‘interactivity’ and ‘crossovers’ between science and art as a response to the perceived crisis in the relationship between the sciences and their publics. However, sonification can also be understood as the latest iteration in a long tradition of theorizing the relations between nature, science and human experience. This article analyses the recent public fascination with sonification and argues that sonification grips public imaginations through the promise of sublime experiences. I show how the ‘auditory sublime’ is constructed through varying combinations of technological, musical and rhetorical strategies. Rather than maintain a singular conception of the auditory sublime, practitioners draw on many scientific and artistic repertoires. However, sound is often situated as an immersive and emotional medium in contrast to the supposedly more detached sense of vision. The public sonification discourse leaves intact this dichotomy, reinforcing the idea that sound has no place in specialist science.
Science & Technology Studies, 2005
Patent regulation provides numerous examples of how policy decisions have consequences that run counter to what was intended. One reason that unintended consequences ensue arises from the fact that when powerful and organised business interests consider that a new reform inhibits their economic appropriation opportunities, they seek to make the perceived inadequacies of the law less harmful to their interests. They may achieve this through alternative legal means or by the adoption of new technologies. For certain reasons, regulating DNA patenting is especially vulnerable to unintended consequences. For businesses, one possible alternative to patents is to encode DNA sequences as music and use copyright and trade secrecy rather than patents. Of course, such alternative means of protection can have their own unintended consequences. If we are right in predicting that if molecular biology patenting is suppressed more and more, the legal and technological measures that lock up information will become increasingly attractive to industry, then one should tread very cautiously when reforming the patent system in this field.
Converting DNA to Music: ComposAlign
German Conference on Bioinformatics, 2009
Alignments are part of the most important data type in the field of comparative genomics. They can be abstracted to a character matrix derived from aligned sequences. A variety of biological questions forces the researcher to inspect these alignments. Our tool, called COMPOSALIGN, was developed to sonify large scale genomic data. The resulting musical composition is based on COMMON MUSIC and allows the mapping of genes to motifs and species to instruments. It enables the researcher to listen to the musical representation of the genome-wide alignment and contrasts a bioinformatician's sight-oriented work at the computer.
Genetic Music: When Genes Code for Melodies Instead of Proteins
2020
In the present work we present a methodology for teaching the basis of the genetic code through music composition, with the aim to combine science and arts learning. The project was carried out by 155 students, the so-called MARGA Consortium, with ages comprised between 10 and 17 years from different public schools located in the Principality of Asturias, Spain. The different groups generated 8 different music works using a short genetic sequence obtained from the human notch1 gene, receptor of mutations leading to chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
When air becomes music An example of how biology deals with data
Dataoverflow / insat press, 2022
This article is mainly based on the book " This is your brain on music " by Daniel J. Levitin, and slightly on the work of Oliver Sachs. I tried to imbued it with a personal touch but at the end of the day I'm just standing on the shoulders of giants and I would be remiss if I didn't urge you to go back to the source, where you would find the real deal. When air becomes music : An example of how biology deals with data
Apropos sonification: a broad view of data as music and sound
AI & SOCIETY, 2012
Numbers have been identified with symbolic data forever. The profound association of both with acoustics, music, and sonic art from Pythagoras to current work is beyond reproach. Recently, sonification looks for ways to realize symbolic data (representing results or measurements) as well as ''raw'' data (signals, impulses, images, etc.) into compositions. In the strictest sense, everything in a computer is symbolic, that is, represented by 0s and 1s. In the arts, the digital age has broadened and enhanced the conceptual landscape not simply through its servitude to the creative process, but as its partner. However, there is a rich history of the use of data that no doubt has paved the way for many of today's experiments including my own. Keywords Music Á Sonic art Á Music history Á Algorithmic composition Á DNA music 1 The sound of music La parole indéfinie, c'est le son.-F. Chopin Music is abstract to begin with. This must be distinctly understood or what follows will make little sense. Throughout history, much music was inextricably attached to text or used as an extension of language to give it meaning, as in the Ubantu (the talking drums of Ghana)literally a musical telegraph. The songs of the Inuit throat singers, though wordless, are filled with narrative. In the Western common practice, the rise of ''pure'' music freed of text matured in the nineteenth century through the ideals of romanticism. E. T. A. Hoffmann saw instrumental music, particularly Beethoven's, as the sole purveyor of genuine expression to music's specific nature (its abstraction). He goes on to say that:
Evolution, Mutation and Hybridity: Audio Arts and Live Biotechnology Recordings
In this paper, I discuss the creation of hybrid audio works that include “field” recordings of biotechnology practices in laboratory situations, archival radio sound and contemporary performance texts. I will also respond to the hybridising of forms in contemporary audio arts. As a part of my Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong, I have created a number of new media performance texts, including radio works, based on a series of bioethical fables. These fables respond to the “miraculous futures” promised by contemporary biotechnologies. These works include a radio play, The Woman Who Knitted Herself a Child, presented by ABC Radio National “Airplay” in December 2004,1 Chromosome Knitting, an installation based performance which incorporates live biotechnology and sound, and Dr Egg and The Man with No Ear, a puppetry and animation performance which has been commissioned by the Sydney Opera House “Kids in the House” program, for young adult audiences. Finally a more documentary style piece, Recipe for Life is in development stage with producer Jane Ulman at the ABC. All these works will include sound recordings and from a biotechnology workshop I undertook at “SymbioticA”, the science/art laboratory that is incorporated in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western Australia. This took place during the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth 2004. For the purposes of this paper I will focus on the works produced or in development for radio, as well as a brief discussion of Chromosome Knitting installation, as an “extreme mutation” of sound and live science. Some of the questions I am asking for the purposes of this paper include: • How can concepts of evolution, hybridity, cloning and mutation inform current audio arts practices? • How does the medium of radio lend itself to the areas of live microbiology recordings? Can we hear the sound of one cell dividing? • Does the medium need to respond to the message? And vice versa - should new technologies inform the creative practices? • How does “presentation” of “live” biotech science, rather than “representation” allow audiences to grapple with the ethics of biotechnologies? • How can concepts of evolution, hybridity, cloning and mutation inform current audio arts practices?
Biographing the DNA: Inquiry into Becoming and Being of Scientific Objects
An inquiry into the nature of contemporary scientific objects illustrates that they have reconfigured the terrain of human understanding by transposing our investigation pertaining the old question, 'What is reality?' from the traditional bipolarity of what is and what is not onto the plane of degrees of reality and further afield into the dynamics of scientific existence. By biographing the DNA molecule, as an example of a contemporary scientific object, from Lorraine Daston's perspective of applied metaphysics, this study goes beyond examining its reality as a matter of degree to 'modes' of scientific existence and perception. This paper contends that if we further examine the being of contemporary scientific objects we realize that the being of these objects, as exemplified by the DNA, is not merely a matter of degree but also of 'modes' of being, which include the linguistico-poetical, the philosophical, and the aesthetical.
2012
It is those implicit structures and relationships in apparently mysterious musical experience that I am interested in exploring here. As a scientist by training with a consistent passion for classical guitar playing, I would like make an attempt to explain the musical experience in terms of science and mathematics, hoping to fill some gaps between the knowledge of scientists and artistic intuition of musicians.
“Turning the Invisible Visible”: Transdisciplinary Bioart Explorations in Human-DNA Interaction
Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021
Hybrid interactive systems that combine living and digital components can engage, educate, and inform users, and are of growing interest in the HCI community. Advances in synthetic biology are transforming what is possible to do with these living media interfaces (LMIs). Bioart is a practice in which artists, often using synthetic biology methods, work with living organisms to creatively explore the human relationship with nonhuman organisms. We present results from an interview study with expert bioartists as well as our hands-on experience in a bioart project where we created poetry-infused wine by encoding and inserting a Persian Sufi poem into the DNA sequence of living yeast cells. We find that engaging in bioart practice generates transdisc iplinary fluency with implications for access and activism and our understanding of the qualities of living media. We further explore the qualitative aspects of interacting directly with DNA and implications for sustainable futures.
Music, Creativity and Scientific Thinking
Many scientists have practiced music as one of their main avocations and among these many have also attributed scientific insights to their musical practices. This essay examines the many fruitful connections reported by scientists themselves concerning the utility of music as a creative practice that informs their science.
Where Art and Science Meet: Genetic Engineering in Contemporary Art
kunsttexte.de, 2003
In the twentieth century, there was probably no more popular scientific term than «gene» and no other scientific discipline's images and visual metaphors achieved the status of all-pervasive cultural icons like those of molecular biology. The significance ascribed to genes, in anticipation of mapping and marketing them, extends far beyond their immediate role in heredity and development processes. The form of pictorial representation of the human genome in the shape of a double helix and images of the twenty-three pairs of human chromosomes are today no longer neutral descriptions of human genetic processes but rather have advanced to the status of ornaments and vehicles of a mythological and religious meaning of «life itself». Already around 1900, early representatives of the young discipline of genetics exhibited a tendency to indulge in utopian rhetoric, conjuring up visions of a «biological art of engineering» or a «technology of living organisms», which did not confine itself to the shaping of plants and animals but aspired to setting new yardsticks for human coexistence and the organisation of human society. Then, as now, the heralds of this «biological revolution» were predicting nothing less than a second creation; this time, however, it would be an artificially created bioindustrial nature, which would replace the original concept of evolution. In contemporary art, many exhibitions in recent years have taken as their theme the effects of this «bio-logical revolution» on people's self-image and on the multi-layered interrelations between art and genetics. However, in contrast to the first encounters between art and genetics, which began in the early twentieth century with art's visual and affirmative engagement with genetics, today these «scientific» images are decoded through the linking of art and the images of the life sciences and a new way of reading them results. Artists take the terminology of the sphere of art and apply it to the technically generated images of molecular biology or other life sciences, question their claim to «objec-tivity» and «truth», and render them recognisable as a space where other fields of knowledge and cultural areas are also inscribed. With the aid of an iconography of images from science, the attempt is made to decipher the cultural codes that these images transport additionally.
Sounds sequential: sonification in the social sciences
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2006
This article discusses the use of sound for auditory information display, and in particular its application for exploration of scientific data, known as sonification. Sonification can be defined as the use of sound to display data of scientific interest in order to investigate structures, trends or patterns in the data. Background is provided from several perspectives: the use of the senses in the history of science, the strengths of human hearing, the recent technological availability of auditory interfaces, the development of sonification itself, and differentiation of sonification from musical practices. In Western science, as in Western culture, the eye has become the predominant organ of sense; using the ear consciously in research thus implicitly questions the implications of the eye's predominance.
The making of The Genoma Music
Revista Iberoamericana de Micología, 2005
Both genetic and musical sequences are ordered structures composed of combinations of a small number of elements, of nucleotides and musical notes. In the case of the genome, the emergence of cellular functions makes the order meaningful; in the case of musical sequences, the consequence of order is the production of mysterious esthetical effects in the human mind. Can any musical significance be found in DNA sequence? In this work, we present the technique used to convert DNA sequences into musical sequences. The musical equivalent of the sequence of a number of genes, either of fungal origin, such as Candida albicans or Sacharomyces cerevisiae (SLT2), or belonging to the human genome (genes involved in Alzheimer syndrome, blindness, and deafness such as Connexine 26 gene) has been obtained. Non-coding sequences are also important in life and music. The non-coding alphoid sequence has also been translated into a musical sequence, in this case using Fibonacci´s golden number basic series as structural helper. The elementary musical sequence derived from DNA sequence has served as an imposing frame in which rhythms, sounds, and melodies have been harmonically inserted. The "Genoma Music" Project is essentially a creative metaphor of the basic unity between the human mind and the natural ordered structure of life.