The music of life

摘要

Music and science seem irreconcilable to many, but there is a close and long-standing relationship between them. Since antiquity, music has been categorized as scientia mathematica, together with arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. In the eighteenth century, Johann Sebastian Bach composed some almost mathematically constructed canons as part of his Musical Offering. And Karlheinz Stockhausen used the Fibonacci series to determine the durations of the 33 Moments in Mikrophonie II in 1965. More recently, the sciences have offered patterns in data, such as those arising from genomics, as inspirations for musical composition. But previous attempts to portray DN A, the icon of twentieth-century science, in musical terms have been limited to the computerized conversion of nucleotide sequences into audible patterns.