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Revelation Tuning Demo

“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:

Comments Off on Revelation Tuning Demo   |  tags: Michael Harrison, music, Revelation, Revelation tuning | posted in Miscellaneous

Algorithm used to produce “Swine Flu Hemagglutinin”

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

Comments Off on Algorithm used to produce “Swine Flu Hemagglutinin”   |  tags: algorithm, hemagglutinin, music, swine flu | posted in Miscellaneous

“Swine Flu Hemagglutinin”: amino acid sequence as ambient music

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.


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:

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

36 comments   |  tags: ambient, FJ966952, hemagglutinin, mp3, music, swine flu | posted in Miscellaneous

Long Alerts 2009-02-23

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)

Comments Off on Long Alerts 2009-02-23   |  tags: alert sound, Creative Commons, mp3, music | posted in Miscellaneous