Live: Music made to accompany the Myrtle Rust genome

Описание: In my more recent sonification work, I made the effort to make the audio more tuneful and harmonious so that it could be listened /analyses for longer periods of time without fatigue. On reflection, I was quite taken with the musicality of the audio and decided to have a go at writing some music to accompany it.

This has taking me down a whole new research path to think about the science of music. How does music work, how do some things stand out and how do others blend into the overall sound? I thought about this whilst I was writing computer code to convert the DNA sequences into audio. It turns out that musical thinking improves the outcomes of the science research, and this allowed me to blend multiple layers of audio (and therefore more layers of data) into a single audio track.

The outcome of this drift into musification of the genomic data has been a series of ensemble performances of tracks based on sonification of the Myrtle Rust genome. The events provide an opportunity to talk about the science of important issues such as the effect of Myrtle Rust on Australian native plants. But these events also provide an opportunity to blur the lines between art (music) and science in interesting ways and to engage people who might not otherwise be interested.