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."

My own DNA...

[ect5150]

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

Wasn't Douglas Adams prior art for this?

[gslj]

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

The Shamen did exactly this in1995

[psyclops]

The track 'S2 Translation' on the Shamen album Axis Mutatis was *exactly* this, being music generated from the DNA sequence of the S2 protein. Very odd track, strangely hypnotic and ethereal but a little annoying after a while. Pretty visible prior art if you ask me (though IANAL). More about the track here [nemeton.com]. Not surprisingly, the S2 protein is the receptor for serotonin...

Re:Pickover?

[Ambiguous Puzuma]

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 contain tandemly recurring segments."

Re:Wasn't Douglas Adams prior art for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Clarke's proposal of the communications satellite wasn't in a work of fiction. See http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_058.jpg [lakdiva.org] and http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/1945ww_305.jpg [lakdiva.org] and overall http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/ [lakdiva.org]

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

[DaedalusHKX]

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 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.

If someone with a strong mind had patented stupidity and gullibility, would the world be full of brilliant free acting individuals instead of gullible sheep, just because they'd have to pay to be stupid and gullible? Since almost 99% of city dwellers have cable TV, I bet they would also pay to use a "stupidity" patent.

Re:Uh... What?

[ClickOnThis]

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 of his direct control. He employed various things, including I Ching, the positions of stars on maps, even the manufacturing defects on manuscript paper, for the sources of pattern in his work. That may seem whimsical, but I still think he was serious about his objectives.

I think that John Cage's music was not so much about creating musical works as it was about defining musical processes and then following them to see where they would go, no matter where that was. I'll admit that I don't have John Cage loaded up on my MP3 player, but the works I have heard by him are still intriguing in their own way.