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June 1, 2007
When most people think of sounds and science they think of physics. Not so with Rie Takahashi. Takahashi, a graduate student in biology at the University of California at Los Angeles, first connected sounds and science in Dr. Jeffrey Miller's seminar in protein sequences in music. Takahashi, who has studied piano since she was nine years old, developed along with Miller an algorithm that converts protein sequences to music.
The most difficult part, says Takahashi was converting the twenty amino acids, the building blocks of proteins into thirteen notes. "It's not musical to have a twenty note range," she adds. To convert the twenty amino acids into thirteen notes Takahashi and Miller focused on pairing similar amino acids. To improve musicality each amino acid was assigned a chord, a unique chord for each codon. Similar amino acids were assigned the same chord. The frequency of a codon's occurrence determines the length of the chord, that is the more frequently a codon occurs the longer the chord.
Reducing the number of notes and assigning chords to the codons makes the music more melodic and not quite so jumpy. Takahashi and Miller are currently piloting a program written by collaborator, Frank Pettit, that uses their conversion rules, to translate large sections of genomes. The program is available for anyone to convert their protein sequence into music.
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