Teri sez, "Analog Science Fiction Magazine has a new feature, 'The Science Behind the Story', which allows their science ficiton authors to talk a bit about the realities behind the speculative fiction they've written. Currently they have a feature by Carl Frederick, author of December's 'The Fruitcake Genome' that has some pretty cool sounding music used in the story and developed by a computer's analysis of the drosophila genome available for download."
But the story was written after I finished a computer program to generate 'music' from parts of the fruit fly genome. I used the output of the program as input to a music synthesizer and was frankly 'blown away' when I listened to the music. It, to me at least, sounds 'composed'–and good! I called the piece, 'The Little March of the Fruit Flies'. You can click and download this file to hear an MP3 of it. I'd be very interested to hear what people think of it. Maybe any non-random data stream would make music–I don't know. Or maybe there's something intrinsic to the genome that makes it 'musical'.
As for why I wrote this program: From my years of examining squiggles on chart recorders–trying to pull signals from noise, I got the notion that the eye, while great for two and three-dimensional pattern detection, is far inferior to the ear for finding one-dimensional patterns. And from my vantage point of being one of the world's most dreadful violinists, I thought that music might be the right paradigm for an examination of one-dimensional information streams. Arguably, the genome is the most important linear information stream on the planet–so I decided to write a computer program to translate DNA sequences to musical notes.
(Thanks, Teri!)
