PM—Protein music

We present the program PM for the analysis of protein sequence information using audification. Audification is the technique of using the sense of hearing to analyse data (Jackson, 1993). The advantage of audification over visualisation in data analysis is that sound has the property that when different notes are played together they can still be individually heard: in vision colours blend to form new colours. This distinction can be very useful when studying multivariate data. The one dimensional structure of DNA maps naturally onto musical sequences (Hayashi and Munakata, 1984; Ohno and Ohno, 1986). The mapping algorithm in PM is designed to translate coding sequences into sound in a way that is more harmonious and more open to analysis than previous methods. The PM algorithm uses the DNA nucleotide sequence to form the musical top line, and the properties of the translated amino-acids to form the bass line. The notes are in the scale of C Major and there are three beats to the bar. Each codon corresponds to a bar of music and the notes are played on the beat in order of nucleotide sequence. The mapping of the top line to musical notes is as follows: A4 submediant E3 mediant C3 tonic G3 dominant The mapping of the bass line to notes is more complicated and is based on the designation of amino- acid physico-chemical properties of Taylor (1983). Each of the properties has a note assigned to it. The mapping is as follows: polar hydrophobic charged positive aliphatic aromatic tiny