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Music From DNA Patented
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jul 30, 2007 10:21 PM
from the tinkle-of-little-coins dept.
from the tinkle-of-little-coins dept.
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."
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Prior Art (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
My own DNA... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:My own DNA... (Score:5, Funny)
Swi
Parent
Re:My own DNA... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:My own DNA... (Score:4, Funny)
"Hey Hey, we're 98% Monkeys....."
Parent
Re:My own DNA... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Pickover? (Score:3, Informative)
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
For Christ Sake (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Beautiful Music (Score:5, Funny)
Music from DNA, DNA from music (Score:5, Funny)
prior art exceedingly likely, except ..... (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
Wind Chimes!!
See, they are similar because it's about making "music" from the things we find in nature.
Prior Art: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Score:4, Informative)
See Music and Fractal Landscapes [tu-darmstadt.de] (pdf).
It describes generating music from every aspect of nature.
The actual patent (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a link [uspto.gov] to the actual patent of interest.
Re:Uh... What? (Score:4, Informative)
----
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.
Parent
Re:Uh... What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Uh... What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Uh... What? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Uh... What? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?)...
Parent
Re:Uh... What? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Uh... What? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:Uh... What? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:Uh... What? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
More prior art (Score:4, Informative)
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.")
Parent