Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!ig!daemon From: mike@MEDIA-LAB.MEDIA.MIT.EDU Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.bio-matrix Subject: Re: Susumu Ohno reference Message-ID: <5889@ig.ig.com> Date: 14 Apr 88 18:04:26 GMT Sender: daemon@presto.ig.com Lines: 21 From: Michael Hawley It gives testimonial to our ability to find interesting things in oddball patterns. It turns out that many data streams sound interesting when hammered out as music. e.g., playing straight ascii text on a synthesizer sounds interesting because letter frequencies in the source language color and define the tonality of the "music" that results. I've heard Ohno's genetic Chopin, and my immediated impression was, he was using a pretty sophisticated strategy to map genetic sequences to 10-finger melody+accompaniment piano scores. I would suspect that Zipf's law (re: how so many human information- organizing tasks exhibit 1/n-like frequency distributions) is closer to the point than some kind of eternal golden braid that ties together birdsongs, genes, and music. Composers are certainly allowed to take inspiration from all over, and they do, so it should not be surprising to find that musical sequences often bear a certain resemblance to other natural phenomena. One very valuable aspect for scientific work is that, just as visualizing data on good graphical workstations is a powerful discovery tool, so is listening to it.