It’s been a delicate path to tread, and my approach has been shaped by seeing genes as simultaneously physical matter and things of extraordinary wonder. Humans [...]]]> Today The Guardian brings us details on Michael Zev Gordon’s new piece, Allele. The piece uses the human genome as source material and is being debuted on July 9.

It’s been a delicate path to tread, and my approach has been shaped by seeing genes as simultaneously physical matter and things of extraordinary wonder. Humans share more than 99% of our genetic material. But every so often in any gene, at known points, or “polymorphisms”, tiny differences in genetic structure occur between groups of individuals. The different forms of the gene at these points are called alleles – and specific aspects of our individuality are influenced by particular allelic combinations. The scientific research has involved comparing certain alleles in musicians with those in non-musicians. The driving, expressive impulse for my piece has been to highlight these miraculous variants.

It took me time to get my head around the science involved. Things crystallised when I began to map a segment of common sequence leading up to my chosen polymorphism – A, C and A on to the same musical note-names; then T – “ti’ in the doh-re-mi solfège system – on to B, and so on. Adding a supple rhythm, I arrived, to my surprise, at something that sounded quite like plainsong: it became the initial gesture of the piece.

Other, pragmatic factors were formative, too. We had to decide who the performers would be. It was a starting point for the project that I would use their specific DNA data in my work – we were drawn to the image of “singing one’s genes”. That led to a multipart choir, and, inevitably for me, the model of Thomas Tallis’s 40-voice motet, Spem in Alium. The common linguistic root of Alium and Allele – the other – was not lost on us either.

DarwinTunes is a computer program developed by Dr Bob MacCallum, a bioinformatician at Imperial College London. In the first instance DarwinTunes does three things. It stores a lot of computer-generated songs on a server, presents the songs to the world via a web interface, and allows people to listen to and rate them.

So far [...]]]>

DarwinTunes is a computer program developed by Dr Bob MacCallum, a bioinformatician at Imperial College London. In the first instance DarwinTunes does three things. It stores a lot of computer-generated songs on a server, presents the songs to the world via a web interface, and allows people to listen to and rate them.

So far this sounds rather like the online music services on offer today – but there is an important difference. Whereas the songs on Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify, etc are made by singers, songwriters and bands, DarwinTunes makes its own songs, and the songs get better through time.

DarwinTunes does this by evolving new songs. Each song in DarwinTunes is based on a bit of computer code. These bits of code periodically “reproduce” to form a new population of daughter songs. However, the daughters are not the same as their parents. First, parent songs have “sex” – they exchange bits of their code so that their daughters are unique mixtures of their parents’ codes. Second, daughters “mutate” – they contain random changes in their code. The result is that every generation of songs is subtly different from the one that preceded it.

These processes are analogous to those make genetic variety in living things; we think that that they are also at work when humans make new songs. They are not, however, enough for evolution. Many daughter songs will not sound very good; in fact, they may sound worse than their parents. (In the same way many mutant animals are very unhealthy.) In order to get evolution we need a way of identifying attractive songs – and ensuring that they increase in the population. In short, we need a selective force. And we have one: you.

Read more at DarwinTunes.com.