Listening to swine flu

Swine flu virus (according to Wikipedia...could be a grape juice spill I suppose...)

Using the I-am-a-bulletin board function of this blog this week... here is something I came across that I need to keep track of - protein and amino acid music.

I gather this is an example of audiation (a variation on the idea of visualization) in which patterns and correspondences hidden in data might be revealed through translation to music. Here's another spot to look at...

This example (on a blog by Stephen Zielinski) looks at the sequence of amino acids in swine flu and produces ambient music. I'm a little bothered that he had a goal - ambient music - in this. I suppose I should just accept that as a form of translation, this intends to make something in the target language rather than to find something in the source....but I am just more interested in what happens when you haven't got anything in mind and let yourself go where the text leads...

You can listen here...

You can see the whole post here.

Edit: this link - to a simultaneous ambient composition created by edits to Wikipedia - is what got me thinking of audiation earlier this week...