Scientists Found A Way to Turn the Micro-World into Music

But that's not all

Hiya!

I don’t know what I’d do without music. I mean, I, myself, do not possess any musical abilities, but damn do I love listening to it. Which I do religiously — all genres for all moods—and connect to it on an energetic, almost vibrational level. No doubt you have your own special relationship with music.

In some ways, music has a sort of power over us. The best of it is created using pure emotion and represents words we can’t speak or perhaps ones that don’t even exist yet. But music is so much more than even that. Throughout the last few decades, music’s influence expanded beyond the inner world of emotions and art, and into the field of science. (Which, only makes sense since we live in a world of opposites.)

The Power of Music

I’ve written about music several times, and for good reasons. Music really is powerful — you might even say music is the language of humanity. I mean, it’s difficult to imagine a world without music as we know it.

But music and melody go far beyond impacting our emotions or being a vessel for expressing them. At the heart of it, music is sound — and sound is physics. In fact, the connection between music and math has been around for centuries. The ancient philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras began exploring the relationship over 2,000 years ago.

He was perhaps, the first to advocate music as something good for our health. I think we all know Pythagoras was right about that. (Have you heard Weightless by Marconi Union? It’s been shown to lower anxiety levels when you listen to it.)

Anyway, Pythagoras was convinced that the frequencies of music have healing properties after discovering the rhythmic connections between musical chords and mathematical ratios. Over the last forty years, researchers used our advancing technology to play with the relationship between music and mathematics, and now they’re at it again.

This time, they’re converting molecules into music.

The Pre-Game of Music as Molecules

In the 1980s, a pianist and now also a biomolecular engineer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, David Deamer, realized that three out of the four DNA bases match letters of musical notes — A, C, and G. He assigned the fourth DNA base, “T,” to the note “E,” and began playing the DNA sequence on the piano.

As he listened, he noticed some note combinations worked well in C Major 6th or A Minor 7th. Later, he and some colleagues composed melodies using the musically converted DNA notes into a cassette called “DNA Suite,” which comprised of music based on the bacterial DNA sequences and human insulin gene.

Though that was just the beginning. Skip ahead to 2008 when a composer named Stuart Mitchell founded a company called Your DNA Song which does just as the name suggests. You send in your DNA, and they use a sonification method to turn it into a tune unique to you.

Side note: I gotta say, I’m a big fan of combining subjects to create something new. We can’t prove that everything is connected, yet deep down, I think we all know it is. Perhaps our understanding of everything will come once we learn how all our known avenues of knowledge play off each other. But until then, back to the topic.