Rhythmic Parsing of Sonified DNA and RNA Sequences                                                          


Charlie Cullen       and Eugene Coyle
Department of Music,                              Department of Control Engineering,           
Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin                    Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin          
IRELAND                                                    IRELAND                          
E-mail:   charlie.cullen@dit.ie                            E-mail: *eugene.coyle@dit.ie               


Abstract 
Sonification allows existing mathematical data to be                               
used as the model for audio output, notably that the audio                                     
produced is related to or representative of that data in some way.                             
Existing work in the field has been largely focused on the                                     
aesthetic tailoring of the output audio for compositional benefit                              
rather than as a framework for audio representation and                                        
analysis.                                                                                      
It is the goal of this research to apply existing techniques for                               
pitch substitution to an analytical method that seeks to define                                
and represent patterns within existing data sets (primarily DNA                                
and RNA sequences). It is often the case that sonified audio has                               
little or no rhythmic component, and it is felt that as rhythm is                              
such an important part of the musical analysis process it should                               
be given far more serious consideration when representing                                      
mathematical data as audio.                                                                    
In order to adequately analyse the different rhythms and time                                  
signatures that can be used to parse sonified data, a piece of                                 
software has been developed called DNASon that allows for basic                                
time interval and signature definitions for application to a                                   
sonified DNA/RNA sequence.                                                                     


REFERENCES           
[1] Sonification Report: Status of the Field and 
Research Agenda, International Conference on 
Auditory Display (ICAD) 1997        
[2] H. G. Kaper, S. Tipei and E. Wiebel, Data 
Sonification     and    Sound      Visualization 
Computing in Science and Engineering, Vol. 1, 
No. 4 (July/August '99), 48-58      
[3] Douglas R. Hofstadter, GEB: an Eternal 
Golden Braid (pg 518-519), Penguin Books 
ISBN 0-14-028920-8                  
[4] Nobuo Munakata and Kenshi Hayashi, 
Basically Musical, Nature 310, 96 (1984) 
[5] Nobuo Munakata and Kenshi Hayashi, Gene 
Music: Tonal assignments of Bases and Amino 
Acids (pg 72-83) In Visualizing Biological 
Information (Ed. C. Pickover),World Scientific, 
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