Stephan Zielinski: Dwa

“Revelation tuning” is the tuning system Michael Harrison used for his album Revelation: Music in Pure Intonation.  He describes it at Music In Pure Intonation.

It’s not a chromatic scale, and he picked the specific frequencies to produce perfect fifths (in a 3:2 ratio) and perfect minor sevenths (in a 7:4 ratio.)  If I’ve calculated this correctly, these are the corresponding microtonal adjustments (to a precision of one cent): F 0, F# -27, G +4, G# -123, A +8, Bb -29, B +12, C +2, C# -125, D +6, Eb -31, E +10.

With that in place, a score written this way:

Sounds like this:

The algorithm used to produce “Swine Flu Hemagglutinin” (PDF, 16K)

Swine flu has been sequenced.  More out of curiosity than anything else, I wrote code to translate a key gene into a piece of ambient music:

“Swine Flu Hemagglutinin” (MP3)

The algorithm I used is a bit complicated, but just in case you’re curious: since the gene is expressed as a surface protein antibodies can sense, it’s considered as a string of amino acids.  Each beat corresponds to one amino acid, and the piece is in 3/4 time, so each six measures would correspond to five turns around the alpha structure.  (I’m weaseling because I haven’t the foggiest idea how the protein actually gets folded.)  Amino acids with side chains that are neither aromatic not aliphatic control the piano and organ: the nine non-hydrophobics the piano, and the four hydrophobics the organ. The three amino acids with aliphatic side chains control the low synthesizer, while the four with aromatics control the percussion.  

ש

Update 2009-04-30: For folks coming in from the cnn.com article Making music out of swine flu and wondering about the line, “Zielinski saw it as a form of highly organized information that a human did not design.”: Yes, that phrasing raises the question of who or what I think DID design it. (God? Aliens?) In reality, self-organizing systems evince great complexity without need for a conscious designer. Swine flu was not designed at all– it evolved.

Strictly speaking, this is a version of swine flu hemagglutinin, FJ966952. The actual amino acid sequence:

MKAILVVMLYTFATANADTLCIGYHANNSTDTVDTVLEKNVTVTHSVNLLEDKHNGKLCK
LRGVAPLHLGKCNIAGWILGNPECESLSTASSWSYIVETSSSDNGTCYPGDFIDYEELRE
QLSSVSSFERFEIFPKTSSWPNHDSNKGVTAACPHAGAKSFYKNLIWLVKKGNSYPKLSK
SYINDKGKEVLVLWGIHHPSTSADQQSLYQNADAYVFVGSSRYSKKFKPEIAIRPKVRDQ
EGRMNYYWTLVEPGDKITFEATGNLVVPRYAFAMERNAGSGIIISDTPVHDCNTTCQTPK
GAINTSLPFQNIHPITIGKCPKYVKSTKLRLATGLRNVPSIQSRGLFGAIAGFIEGGWTG
MVDGWYGYHHQNEQGSGYAADLKSTQNAIDEITNKVNSVIEKMNTQFTAVGKEFNHLEKR
IENLNKKVDDGFLDIWTYNAELLVLLENERTLDYHDSNVKNLYEKVRSQLKNNAKEIGNG
CFEFYHKCDNTCMESVKNGTYDYPKYSEEAKLNREEIDGVKLESTRIYQILAIYSTVASS
LVLVVSLGAISFWMCSNGSLQCRICI

Maggie Koerth-Baker’s excellent article from 2009 April 28, “Swine Flu Q&A”, is available here:
Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Swine Flu Q&A”, at boingboing.net

Having need of a few long (5-20 second) unambiguous alert sounds, I created some.

Three simple ones: BA BC B5

Two more elaborate ones: BB B4W

One strident one: PS

And one happy one: AC

Released under terms of
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

If you want to redistribute any of this stuff, please include the file “stephanZielinski_longAlerts_2009-02-23_README.txt” from the .zip below.

If you end up using any of this stuff for anything cool, I’d enjoy hearing about it.

Archive including everything:
All seven Stephan Zielinski Long Alerts 2009-02-23 mp3 files (.zip archive, 908K)