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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."
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.
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make install -not war
And what happens when the music generated from my OWN DNA is a #1 hit?
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
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
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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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
Im pretty sure my DNA sounds like "Oops I did it again"
So much for finding a nice girl & making beautiful music together.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
This will complement nicely those audiophiles who emit DNA every time they listen to their $30,000 hi-fi systems.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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 (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 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.")
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
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.
See Music and Fractal Landscapes (pdf).
It describes generating music from every aspect of nature.
Cow Cube
I'd say he's in the clear. The patent office, on the other hand, needs a good kick.
Everything will be taken away from you.
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?)...
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
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.
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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 contain tandemly recurring segments."
Here's a link to the actual patent of interest.
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 information storage... and there are those who know how to read it, they won't tell you or me they can, but there's enough in there to make someone very wealthy if they exploit it without allowing "competition". Patents on "information" are as idiotic as they were when they came about.
If someone with a strong mind had patented stupidity and gullibility, would the world be full of brilliant free acting individuals instead of gullible sheep, just because they'd have to pay to be stupid and gullible? Since almost 99% of city dwellers have cable TV, I bet they would also pay to use a "stupidity" patent.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler