Music From DNA Patented

stm2 writes "Two lawyers have patented generating music from a DNA sequence. According to the patent, it covers 'music generated by decoding and transcribing genetic information within a DNA sequence into a music signal having melody and harmony.' A comment to the blog post mentions DNA-derived music being performed at a conference in 1995."

Uh... What?

[Kid Zero (4866)]

Why? I just want to know what possible profit/benefit you could find from making music from DNA.

Re:Uh... What?

[Jugalator (259273)]

It's in the end of the patent... Not that it makes much sense to me... I guess there could theoretically be a minority market for it. :-S

----

The music signal generated from the genetic data can be used in a variety of consumer and industrial products and methods. For example, novelty products such as greeting cards, genetic music CDs, and the like can incorporate a person's individual music generated from their own sample of DNA. The specific DNA sequence can be provided to a company for generation of the genetic music. Alternatively, a sample containing the genetic material can be provided for sequencing and generating the music.

Useful products include individual identity analysis, for example, for security checking, paternity testing, and the like. The music generated by an individual sample can be compared with a control sample. An identity analyzer can be configured to provide an audible signal for a specific comparative result, for example, if the sample and the control differ, e.g., signaling an alarm in a security setting, or when they are the same, e.g., adding excitement to live television coverage of paternity determinations.

Clinical analyzers that compare sequences of patient samples with controls may be programmed to provide soothing melodies when the sequence is "normal" and to provide an audible, for example, discordant music when an "abnormal" sequence is detected. Such signals can provide a signal for the clinical technician to alert a physician to the difference in the sequence.

Re:Uh... What?

[MightyMartian (840721)]

How would this be any different from generating music from the atomic structure of crystals, or from the x-rays being given off by a pulsar? How the fuck can you patent this? What is there to fucking patent? Christ, I wish they'd simply fine guys like this several million times their net worth or make them sign a document promising never to even go within five miles of the patent office or even think about sending in letters.

Re:Uh... What?

[Joe Tie. (567096)]

I'd say he's in the clear. The patent office, on the other hand, needs a good kick.

It's U.S. government corruption.

[Futurepower(R) (558542)]

Big companies want patents to scare smaller companies. They don't care if the patents are valid, because it is too expensive to go before a court. Some lawyers in the U.S. charge $600 per hour. The U.S. government is being sold to anyone who has money.

People in other countries know the U.S. government is corrupt, but Americans either don't know or don't really care.

See this billboard in New Zealand advertising pizza: Hell. Too good for some evil bastards. [getitinwriting.biz]

Re:

[DaedalusHKX (660194)]

Every government is corrupt, the fact that you haven't seen this yet speaks a lot. Eyes open, but not yet seeing the picture. No biggie, sooner or later everyone gets it :)

The upside is this. Patenting DNA based music has to do with that lovely 95 to 96% of the unknown DNA, that scientists, like those "world is flat" guys before them, are calling "junk DNA". I.E. "we don't know or won't tell you what it does yet, so we're going to call it junk, and you'll believe us, because we're *experts*".

Its informa

Re:

[It'sYerMam (762418)]

Every government is corrupt

Is that inherently, or have you actually examined every world government to determine this? I suspect it's merely a hasty generalisation.

The upside is this. Patenting DNA based music has to do with that lovely 95 to 96% of the unknown DNA, that scientists, like those "world is flat" guys before them, are calling "junk DNA". I.E. "we don't know or won't tell you what it does yet, so we're going to call it junk, and you'll believe us, because we're *experts*". Its information st

Re:Uh... What?

[symbolic (11752)]

Seems to me that avante garde artists like John Cage already have stuff like this covered- not by patent, but by prior art. I doubt any of them dealt with DNA specifically, but they were notorious for creating music (in the loosest sense of the word) using any of various sources of random influence.

Re:

[ClickOnThis (137803)]

The parent should be modded "Insightful", not "Funny". John Cage was a notorious jokester but also a committed artist. He did say once that "[his] purpose [was] to eliminate purpose" but later he retreated from this and admitted that the artist has an important role to play in the creation of a work.

I think it's important to draw a distinction between "randomness" and "chance". Cage's approach was to choose certain (not all) aspects of a composition to be left to chance, or if you will, to something out

Er, no.

[Macthorpe (960048)]

1) DNA isn't even fairly random.

2) Patenting a method of converting DNA into music does not mean they have patented 'every note combination possible', just this one method of turning one type of data input into music. People who make music the normal way will still be able to and won't have to pay royalties.

Other than that, your post was 100% correct, in the sense that I assume your username is right.

Re:Uh... What?

[TobyRush (957946)]

The music signal generated from the genetic data can be used in a variety of consumer and industrial products and methods. For example, novelty products such as greeting cards, genetic music CDs, and the like can incorporate a person's individual music generated from their own sample of DNA.

I wrote a program quite a while back which converted text files (say, The Gettysburg Address) into standard MIDI files, and for the result to be anything even remotely playable I needed to do quite a bit of normalization as part of the translation.

So if anyone uses this for greeting cards, it's going to be 1% DNA source material and 99% pre-conceived structure. I'm sure they'll market it as "this is the music that is coursing through your veins!" when in reality it's just a really expensive random-number generator. And I'd be very interested to see what happens if you send the same DNA sample in twice, say a few months apart, and compare the results (which should be identical, right?)...

Re:Uh... What?

[camperdave (969942)]

Well, I had thought of digging up Elvis, cloning him and embedding him into a bunch of ipods. But, I guess I can kiss that scheme goodbye now.

Re:Uh... What?

[mblase (200735)]

It's a faster and straightforward way for geneticists to identify junk DNA in our chromosomes, because it sounds much more like top-40 music.

Similarly, DNA for coding the human brain will sound like NPR; for muscles, Jock Jams; for reproductive organs... well, you get the idea.

Interestingly, the first DNA sample they plugged into this technology was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's. They found out that his chromosomes, in fact, sound remarkably like the Spice Girls being played at 78 rpm. Strange but true.

Re:Uh... What?

[ushering05401 (1086795)]

It just makes no sense.

Translating DNA into music is a really neat concept. Translating anything that has a decipherable system to its design into another design system is rad. But why, why, why, patent it? Is it so someone else does not come along and claim credit for your innovation? I doubt it. Prior art would invalidate any later patent claims.

It just makes no sense. Please bear in mind that I write proprietary software for a living. I would never imagine attempting to prevent a competitor from providing their customers with the best product that they can produce, whether or not it resembled my product. I compete based on the quality of my product and service.

And this translation of DNA into music is not even a salable product... I agree with parent poster. This is yet another bewildering use of the patent system.

Regards.

Re:Uh... What?

[pallmall1 (882819)]

And this translation of DNA into music is not even a salable product...

Litigation is a profitable product for lawyers.

Melody and harmony

[markov_chain (202465)]

So I suppose as long as it's heavy metal it should be safe from litigation ;)

Prior Art

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

This is the kind of invention that would be worth protecting if it protected only the specific device the inventors produced to do it.

But as it happens, the patent as granted would protect them from competing with me, and anyone else whose DNA codes their bodies functionality to play a musical instrument with melody and harmony.

It's a joke, it ruins "science and the useful arts" in the name of "promoting" it, and it ruins the actual narrower right of authors/inventors to be protected for a reasonably limited time from competition stealing their investment just in time to compete with them.

But no one is talking about replacing it with something Constitutional. That would be a great invention, based on the original prior art, that should be as widely copied as possible.

Re:

[Anonymous McCartneyf (1037584)]

And these geniuses have patented something that was done twelve years ago! Presumably not by them.
Grrrr....

Re:

[Chris Brewer (66818)]

Pete Townshend could probably bust this patent - see Baba O'Riley [wikipedia.org]

The original concept for the Lifehouse project was to plug in a person's vital statistics into the synth and have that as the intro to Baba O'Riley - never worked out in the end, but the concepts the same, I believe (didn't RTFA)

Re:

[iter8 (742854)]

A quick google for "dna music" yields 29000 hits. Including http://www.nslij-genetics.org/dnamusic/ [nslij-genetics.org] and http://www.algoart.com/music.htm [algoart.com]. There are lots of samples of music generated by DNA and protein sequences on the web. It's not even much of a trick. I'm off to patent my technique for music made by barking dogs.

My own DNA...

[ect5150 (700619)]

And what happens when the music generated from my OWN DNA is a #1 hit?

Re:My own DNA...

[Loadmaster (720754)]

The RIAA will send a settlement letter to your parents to forward to you. For only $5000 you can continue to live with your current DNA.

Swi

Re:My own DNA...

[ookabooka (731013)]

I was going to mod you up funny, but then thought you missed a bit of the joke, I would have added just a bit more:
The RIAA will send a settlement letter to your parents to forward to you. For only $5000 you can continue to live with your current DNA. Otherwise they will take you to court to have the offending material removed.

Re:

[Joebert (946227)]

Then you'll have no problems with paying the royalties.

Re:

[Bob54321 (911744)]

Then it will be about 99.9% similar to anybody elses "personalized song". Once people realize that then it will go the way of the Flaming Homer/Moe...

Re:My own DNA...

[Tablizer (95088)]

And what happens when the music generated from my OWN DNA is a #1 hit?

"Hey Hey, we're 98% Monkeys....."
       

Re:My own DNA...

[Dr_Barnowl (709838)]

You just gave me a great idea for a lyric to sing at atheist meetings.... (heck, atheists need to take a leaf out of the fundies book and get some inspiring hymns...)


Here we come, a'climbin up the tree,
We've got opposable thumbs now,
They help us grasp and eat....

We're 98% Monkeys,
Our ancestors came from the ground,
We follow the path of best fitness,
'Cause it's the best game in town.

We're just trying to get laid,
Because we're programmed to,
And with each generation,
The women grow bigger boobs.

So don't tell us we're special,
Made by a hand in the sky,
We're shaped by the forces of nature,
And here's the guy to tell you why....

His name is Charles Darwin,
A science dude with a beard,
His theory changed our understandin'
We know you find that kinda weird.

If you're kinda religious,
It don't fit with your worldview.
'Cause it's all about sex, babe,
And what you do to get some too.

Prior Art

[Aranykai (1053846)]

I cannot find a source, but I too can attest to this being done many years ago. My 9th grade Biology teacher played it for us in fact. And now Im 21.

Prepare to meet prior art you two.

More prior art

[Kadin2048 (468275)]

I can with absolute clarity remember seeing albums/tapes of "DNA music" being sold in the gift shops of various museums -- notably the Boston Museum of Science -- in the mid/late 1990s. I remember because I saw it there one day when they were playing it, but didn't buy it, and then I was never able to find it again (I had really wanted to get it as a gift for a biologist friend).

But even beyond that, just typing "DNA music" into Google turns up lots of results, some of which have a lot of history behind them.

The people at AlgoArt [algoart.com] (not sure if they're the people behind the patent or not) have been making (transcribing?) music from DNA sequences since 1992. They have three CDs available. I rather suspect that it might have been one of these that I heard in Boston those years ago.

And this summary page [whozoo.org] contains a reference to a paper published in 1984 which contained specific references to the idea of making music from DNA sequences. ("Hayashi and Munakata , using a system that assigned pitches to the four DNA bases according to their thermal stability within the interval of a fifth, found that converting the DNA sequences to music helped to expose the meaning of specific sequences and made remembering and recognizing specific DNA patterns easier.")

Pickover?

[rockmuelle (575982)]

Didn't Clifford Pickover's Mazes for the Mind (1994) book have a chapter on this?

(on vacation and don't have my copy handy to check...)

-Chris

Re:

[mblase (200735)]

No idea, but Mary Doria Russell tried it out in Children of God [amazon.com] as well.

Re:

[Ambiguous Puzuma (1134017)]

Yes it does. Chapter 39, titled "There is Music in our Genes", describes work done by Susumu Ohno, Nobuo Munakata, and Kenshi Hayashi to map DNA sequences to melodies.

Ohno has also done the reverse, mapping existing music to DNA sequences. "For example, Ohno maps pieces such as Frederic Chopin's Nocturn, opus 55, no. 1, to musical scores and shows that the Nocturn sequences have remarkable similarities with DNA sequences....Some of these similarities arise from the fact that both DNA and gene sequences co

For Christ Sake

[by Anonymous Coward]

Look, I know it's standard groupthink around here to hate patents and anything patent related, but we don't need blatently false stories to rile everyone up.

The patent is not for "music obtained from DNA" it's for a METHOD to obtain music from DNA. The idea is actually pretty damn unique if you ask me. This is not a frivolous patent.

God damn Slashdot seems to get more and more inaccurate every year.

Tune in to DNA 104.5, your (s)hit music station

[cookieinc (975574)]

Im pretty sure my DNA sounds like "Oops I did it again"

Beautiful Music

[Joebert (946227)]

So much for finding a nice girl & making beautiful music together.

Music from DNA, DNA from music

[shigelojoe (590080)]

This will complement nicely those audiophiles who emit DNA every time they listen to their $30,000 hi-fi systems.

There's no prior art for transcoding?

[syousef (465911)]

That's all you're doing here transcoding one kind of information to another.

What's the point in encouraging people to invent shit if they get to lock it up for several lifetimes? What you'll get from this is one really bad DNA->music encoder, and every bit of competition locked out of the race for decades.

If the patent system were a car it'd be a rusted out common piece of shit from the 70s that isn't even worth salvaging as scrap metal.

"Mission to Mars" "prior art"?

[hkfczrqj (671146)]

Was it the movie Mission to Mars that featured something like a DNA sequence transmitted through music? If so, would that count as some sort of prior art?

When art starts getting patented...

[Moochman (54872)]

...you know the intellectual world is going down the tubes.

prior art exceedingly likely, except .....

[paulbd (118132)]

i graduated with a bachelors in molecular biology & biochemistry in 1981. i had already read papers by that time which described audio/musical transcriptions of DNA, RNA and protein sequences specifically designed to take advantage of the greater perceptual bandwidth of the auditory system vs. the visual system.

the one thing that might be novel here (i don't have time to read a patent abstract at present) is if they have found some way to generate musically meaningful compositions that go beyond a simple (chemical unit) => (musical note) mapping. that could enhance the ability of the auditory system to recognize patterns in sequences, and might be worthy of a patent.

My counter patent

[erroneus (253617)]

See, every time we see a stupid new patent, I have to think of one stupider and yet somehow pertinent. So here's my patent idea:

Wind Chimes!!

See, they are similar because it's about making "music" from the things we find in nature.

Re:

[Nazlfrag (1035012)]

I refer you to the parent post, henceforth known as 'Exhibit A'. Here the defendants claims prior art on their back porch, but it clear this information only became public knowledge a whole entire four minutes after the plaintiffs initial patent deceleration. I move that 'Exhibit A' be struck from the record and summarily dismissed.

Dejavu?

[SamP2 (1097897)]

A good century ago or so, at the dawn of radioastronomy, there was a whole big point of "celestial music". People thought that the radio signals emitted by stars have a certain harmony, and when used right, can produce "heavenly" melody.

Needless to say that didn't go very far.

Same story here. Just because you find something which, when transformed, can generate certain audio patterns, doesn't mean it will be any good as *music*. In fact, looking for some "objective", "universal" melody source is pretty much dumb as music preference varies greatly even within our own species (*waits for rock vs rap flaming to start*), and many other species have different combinations of sound they perceive as music (and which we perceive only as noise).

Music is *produced* with a specific purpose in mind, and the production rules vary depending on that purpose. You won't find it bestowed upon you, whether from the stars or magically encoded in some DNA sequence.

I know, I'm gonna apply for my own patent:

[darjen (879890)]

"Method for remembering a musical sequence through notation involving a series of lines and spaces."

Wasn't Douglas Adams prior art for this?

[gslj (214011)]

I remember that the novel "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" featured a spreadsheet that turned financial numbers into music, and that later in the book the plot turned on discovering that DNA and other natural phenomena translated into the music of Bach. That's how I remember it, anyway.

So, do novels count as prior art?

-Gareth

Prior Art: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

[HappyEngineer (888000)]

Wouldn't the book "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" by Douglas Adams be prior art?

See Music and Fractal Landscapes [tu-darmstadt.de] (pdf).

It describes generating music from every aspect of nature.

Prior art (besides what was mentioned in summary)?

[thc69 (98798)]

DNA = Douglas Noel Adams...

Douglas Adams was very interested in the combination of music and math, and biology. I think I even remember reading (probably in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency) about music made from DNA (similar to the idea of making music from corporate profit reports). Then again, I could be pulling that out of MYASS [caltech.edu]...

The actual patent

[geeknado (1117395)]

Having attempted to actually read this patent, it appears that the links in both the summary and the (very brief) article take us to one pertaining to the chimeric encoding of plastidic phosphoglucomutase. Not ideal.

Here's a link [uspto.gov] to the actual patent of interest.

Prior art by Shamen

[pesc (147035)]

In about 1995, The Shamen released the track S2 Translation which was generated by decoding the DNA sequence of the S2 protein. http://www.nemeton.com/axis-mutatis/s2.html [nemeton.com]

Prior Art Was Ignored!

[LifesABeach (234436)]

Bag Pipes are the only instrument that comes to mind that could play the melodies of DNA.