Todd Barton

Human Genome Music

From Wired News:

2001 Todd Barton (composer) assigned each nucleotide to a note and elaborated on the basic theme by shifting the pitches up or down an octave, still maintaining the integrity of the sequence-derived melody. He uses a MIDI sequencer, Xx program, and the graphic music synthesizer, Metasynth, to derive his rhythmic and pitch patterns according to his original nucleotide-to-note assignment. Based on the MIDI output, Barton creates expansions and contractions of the original pattern.

Barton has modified the length of the pitches or assigned different instrumentation to certain parts of the DNA sequence. For example, Barton has assigned the percussion section to perform the beginning segment of Chromosome 1. By taking the beginning segments of all chromosomes, Barton can combine the various musical translations to create ?Genome Music?, the title of his project. Barton has also translated the amino acid sequence of proteins, such as insulin, into a musical sequence based on his set of rules.

—Robert Thomason. DNA the way to San Jose?. Wired News. 12 March 2001.
www.wired.com/news/culture/1,42306-0.html

Here is a list of the genome tracks at Garageband.com:

And two YouTube videos:
Genome Music (part 1)
Genome Music (part 2)