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."

Prior Art

[Aranykai]

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.

Pickover?

[rockmuelle]

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:Uh... What?

[Jugalator]

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.

For Christ Sake

[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.

prior art exceedingly likely, except .....

[paulbd]

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.

More prior art

[Kadin2048]

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.")

Prior Art: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

[HappyEngineer]

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.

Re:Prior Art

[iter8]

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.

Re:Uh... What?

[pallmall1]

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

Litigation is a profitable product for lawyers.

The actual patent

[geeknado]

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.

Wrong patent linked?

[Ambiguous Puzuma]

I think the intended patent is 7247782 [uspto.gov], "Genetic music".
The link in the story takes me to patent 7250557, which appears to be unrelated ("Plastidic phosphoglucomutase genes").

Prior art by Shamen

[pesc]

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]

Re:It's U.S. government corruption.

[It'sYerMam]

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 storage... and there are those who know how to read it, they won't tell you or me they can, but there's enough in there to make someone very wealthy if they exploit it without allowing "competition". Patents on "information" are as idiotic as they were when they came about.

Due to this not being funny, I'm going to assume it's serious. Point being that so-called "junk" DNA firstly isn't transcribed into proteins, and secondly isn't conserved at all. It's known to serve a function (buffering the rest of the DNA from mutation) but only due to its bulk, not what's contained in it. As for information storage, one has to wonder what anyone would want to write down on a medium that is less reliable than most other modern methods, including paper.