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]

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

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.

Re:Uh... What?

[MightyMartian]

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.]

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

Re:

[Wiseman1024]

American patents are ridiculous. You can go as far as patenting a live being. I'll eventually find myself patented in America and sued over the usage of me. onlyinamerica.

It's U.S. government corruption.

[Futurepower(R)]

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]

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]

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? My property 1325627888798945765....

[OldHawk777]

I just registered the "13256278887989457651018865901401704640" numerical sequence with the Reprobate Intellectual Property (RIP.sux) of America. Maybe now your outlandish free-speech can be legally suppressed by perversive dejure sustaining our mediocrity republic.

IOW::TAI [there were no spelling errors]

Next time, for gods' sake, elect a flaming Bush!

!HAVEFUN!

Re:Uh... What?

[symbolic]

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]

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]

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:

[It'sYerMam]

1) DNA isn't even fairly random.

From the point of view of a piece of music it is. Splashes of paint falling on a piece of paper aren't random but you could use them as a source for a random number generator easily.

Re:Uh... What?

[TobyRush]

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up

Re:

[Hal_Porter]

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?)...

Unless you're mutating into something else.

Re:

[ortholattice]

So if anyone uses this for greeting cards, it's going to be 1% DNA source material and 99% pre-conceived structure.

Almost all music generated from "natural" sources is like that, for example, the music generated by the digits of pi. If you take the digits of pi and convert them to a sequence of 10 pure MIDI tones, it would be very boring without the embellishment with elaborate orchestration.

There is at least one "natural" source, however, that bears some passing resemblance to "real" music: the patt

Re:

[sumdumass]

There was a Hollywood movie a While back where they used music to encode or decode a lock on a door to the face on mars. I think it was called red planet or something similar. I think it came out around 2000 or so. I suppose something like this could be done in real life like the ultimate in biometric security or something.

However, I doubt it. But I'm wondering if there is anything in the movie that could be prior art on the concept or if the movie is now subjected to the patent. It would be interesting to

Re:

[Slightly Askew]

You sure it wasn't Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? (Rachmaninoff).

Re:Uh... What?

[camperdave]

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:

[PPH]

Those are going to be big, fat iPods.

Re:Uh... What?

[mblase]

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:

[sh3l1]

For reproductive organs the sex pistols will play :-)

Re:

[ben0207]

Make that Barry White, thankyouverymuch.

Re:Uh... What?

[ushering05401]

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]

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

Litigation is a profitable product for lawyers.

Re:

[Aladrin]

It didn't manage to invalidate this one! Why would they think it would work -for- them, if it didn't prevent them from getting this patent?

We don't know WHY they chose to try to patent this. They could be money-grubbing assholes, or slimey lawyers, or patent trolls... Or they could be a company that wanted to make absolutely sure that nobody could patent this later and take it from them. So they submit a patent and 1 of 2 things happens:

1) They don't get the patent, but they've got a legal document pre

Melody and harmony

[markov_chain]

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

Prior Art

[Doc Ruby]

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]

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

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's something interesting. The person that submitted the story did not even read the patent. The proof is quite simple. At the start of the patent is a list of prior art. This list includes:

Gena et al., Sixth International Syumposium on Electronic Art, Montreal, 1995: 83-85. XI Colloquio di Informatica Musicale, Univerista di Bologna, 1995: 203-204. http://www.artic.edu/.about.pgena/docs/CIMXI-gena- strom.pdf [artic.edu], pp. 1-2 "Musical Synthesis of DNA Sequences." cited by other.

I presume this is the self same co

Re:

[Chris Brewer]

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:

[Doc Ruby]

Actually, Townshend's concept for Lifehouse was for Townshend to serve as the live interface for people's vital stats (and live state in the audience/band) to the synth and the rest of the instruments (including the audience and the band). No one could understand what he was talking about in 1970. He should have said "hippie magic" and just done it.

Re:

[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:

[donaldm]

If you can call the pianola (like a piano but with a punched hole reader) prior art then I guess you can call generating music from a DNA sequence prior art. All you need is a sampling speed and to assign a frequency to each DNA sequence. Actually it is more complex than that since you would have to assign a sound level and possibly the length of time you can hold at the frequency. There I think I have got the gist of how to do this without reading the patent although I have to stress I am not a musician.

Stop AIDS: Copyright your own DNA!

[mikiN]

I propose to start suing all retroviruses under the DMCA since they hijack our DNA in their reproductive cycle, circumventing our copy protection scheme in the process. No matter what damages are awarded, this will put an end to the spread of HIV/AIDS, for the viruses will quickly (as in: immediately) run out of finances to support the ensuing legal battles. their only options being to either face jail time or simply go extinct.

Totally ill-founded patent

[Morgaine]

No it is not worth protecting this kind of patent, under any circumstances, because it corrupts the entire basis on which patents are granted.

A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a patentee for a fixed period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention. [wikipedia.org]

And the reason why the state affords a patentee such a protected period is so that the public disclosure does not place the patentee at a disadvantage while bringing the invention to market, versus others who have obtained the

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

US patents apply only to infringement (including marketing the product) in the US. There are international patents, as well as programmes for "harmonizing" foreign patents, and some foreign jurisdictions merely use the US registry for exclusions in their own jurisdiction.

But so far no one from space has sued in a US court. But we haven't heard from Johnny Cochran in a while, maybe he's beamed up, to raise his prices and profile.

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

A clear display of prior art, even for unimaginative patent examiners.

My point is that patenting a process like this by its inputs and outputs, not the specific mechanism that processes it, is entirely too vague. It's like patenting the gene itself, or otherwise gaining a monopoly on its any expression, not on a novel mechanism for expressing it. Because every human with that gene is executing that process, as we have been. That's a discovery, not an invention. Discoveries are to be published after peer rev

Re:

[Doc Ruby]

Excruciatingly bad Mars movie: Mission to Mars (2000) [imdb.com]. Anyone who was inspired by that dreck should be deported, not granted a patent.

My own DNA...

[ect5150]

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

Re:My own DNA...

[Loadmaster]

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]

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:

[TemporalBeing]

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.

You won't get a dime as you're not the creator of the work - your parents are. So it'll fund their retirement and then you'll get it as an inheritance in the postmortem payments to their estate.

Remember, it's the artist that gets paid, not the work.

Re:

[Joebert]

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

Re:

[Bob54321]

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]

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]

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.

Re:

[Creepy]

then you say you had music in your blood (and bones, and spleen)?

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.

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.")

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:

[mblase]

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

Re:

[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 co

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.

Re:

[fredrated]

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

And yet you are still here, still reading, still posting, why would that be, Mr. Coward?

Re:

[chris_eineke]

it's for a METHOD

Well, guess what. Method Man [wikipedia.org] wants to have a word with you.

Re:

[Shadowlore]

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.

Right, we prefer patently false ones.

Re:

[martinX]

adding excitement to live television coverage of paternity determinations

i'm not sure if i could take the added excitement!

live television coverage of paternity determinations is already a thrill aminute!

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

[cookieinc]

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

Beautiful Music

[Joebert]

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

Music from DNA, DNA from music

[shigelojoe]

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]

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]

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]

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

Re:

[StringBlade]

I thought that was the Internet going down the tubes?

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.

My counter patent

[erroneus]

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]

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]

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]

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

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

Re:

[Torvaun]

Have not read DGHDA, but fictional works can provide prior art in some cases. Specifically, Arthur C. Clarke prevented anyone from patenting geosynchronous satellites by describing them in great detail before the first one went up.

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:

[HappyEngineer]

Oh, and if it helps, DNA are the initials of Douglas Noel Adams. So that book is an instruction from DNA on how to create music from nature.

Re:Prior Art: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Age

[kria]

Alas, you beat me to posting. Glad to see people remembering the Dirk Gently books. I know that I love them.

Anyway, can something fictional really be prior art? :)

Prior art (besides what was mentioned in summary)?

[thc69]

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 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...

Lots of prior art

[jejones]

People have been generating music from streams of data for a LONG time. Mozart's musical dice game comes to mind, as well as Charles Dodge's Earth's Magnetic Field, from back in 1970, which generated some very pleasant music from K index data. And what about Xenakis's work?

What about prior art?

[edwardpickman]

You can patent the process to convert the DNA to music but not the DNA itself as music. You might have some rights to music made from your own unique DNA but patenting the concept is rediculous. I doubt anything of value would be made from DNA but it's the principal. Part of the point is are they sequencing the DNA themselves or using sequencing done by the Human Genome project? If so what rights do they have to the Genome Project sequencing information? It's meant for medical use not to be exploited for so

Still safe forms of music

[AuMatar]

This only covers music with melody and harmony. That means we can still change DNA into rap, punk, and metal.

Are they saying...

[AdmNaismith]

...that they cornered the market on transcribing DNA sequences into music notation in general, or by their parameters? If they are talking in general, they have no leg to stand on- there's too much prior art, fictional and practical. If they have a specific algorithm that makes a particular 'sound', it's still pretty craptacular.

We truly are in hell now

[bryan1945]

While lawyers may have applied for the patent, some PhD in biology wrote the damn thing. My head nearly exploded from trying to read it.

And when I searched for the term "music", nowhere in the patent did the term "music" pop up.

Either someone screwed up the article or they linked to the wrong patent. Dang, I read the article AND tried to read the patent. A first!

Re:

[bryan1945]

Wrong- I clicked on both the link in the summary and the link in the article.

Maybe you should have read my entire comment.

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").

In other news

[Mr. Freeman]

I've patented the creation of music by interpreting electrical signals sent to an amplification device from a guitar.

Seriously, what the hell is this crap? Making music that is somehow based off of DNA. "The song you created starts with a "D", and DNA starts with the same letter, therefore you are guilty of copyright infringement". Or, "This techno beat seems to follow a pattern and DNA has a pattern, therefore we're going to sue you".

There's 2 things you can throw into a proposed law/patent application

Has anyone bothered to go to the patent?

[kocsonya]

The link in both the /. article and in the original Genome Technology article leads you to a patent that has absolutely nothing to do with music. It is a gene patent, awarded to DuPont 6 years ago, namely US patent # 7,250,557 and is about generating GM plants with modulated sugar/starch content. Half of the actual patent is a long sequence description. However, the word 'music' does not occur anywhere in it.

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:

[demonlapin]

That was the example I was thinking of as well. Mod parent up.

Prior Art, Bitches!

[Greyfox]

Humanity has been making music from DNA pretty much since the dawn of time. See also: every song ever made!

These snarky comments posted to Slashdot also made from DNA.

Of course, there's the issue of prior art...

[keraneuology]

~sigh~

Next Steps

[DynaSoar]

Patent music made by coutning how many petals are left on a flower after removing one, chanting for each in turn "she loves me not, she loves me".

The first attempt at this was done by a classically trained opera signer turned radio astronomer. She was on Letterman many years ago.

Since the DNA sequences are owned by the people, via the government, they cannot patent or copyright the sequence. They can, however, copyright the collected works based on any sort of production method they wish. But patent it? Not

Prior Art? Link

[PrvtBurrito]

Ask and ye shall receive: DNA Music Paper from 1995 [petergena.com]. Note, I didn't read the patent, but DNA music has definitely been done before.

So...

[Sierpinski]

So if I took a DNA sequence, converted the letters to notes and started playing on my old high school saxophone, I'd be infringing on a patent?

What kind of morons do we have working at the PTO nowadays? That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard of in a long time. Maybe I should go through with filing my patent about making a squeaking noise by blowing air through my two thumbs with a blade of grass in between them. Unbelievable.

I Played My DNA Backwards . . .

[aplusjimages]

. . . and it said "Satan is good, Satan is my pal. I want to kill everyone."

So....

[TemporalBeing]

...where do parents apply for copyright protection of the DNA they assembled to make their children? After all, they own the copyright for the next few decades thanks to Disney, the RIAA, MPAA, and all those other leech organizations. Why should parents be left out of the mix?

Next thing you know it'll be sibling rivalries over who has the better DNA for music, and Johnny will complain when Susie makes #1 and he can't get on the charts. Either way, their parents will be rich.

Prior Art Was Ignored!

[LifesABeach]

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

Re:

[dido]

Music from Meatloaf? Lots of prior [amazon.com], art [amazon.com] on that one!

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[cyborg_zx]

Translating information from one encoding sequence to another cannot be considered an invention. A specific way of doing it yes; but the general concept? Ludicrous.