sounds of science

An audible representation vibrational spectrum of the 5OYI protein, the building block of the foot and mouth disease virus.

The musical representation of the protein is created by interpolating the frequency spectra of the proteins to generate audible sound by overlaying the molecular vibrations and translating them to the audible frequency range using the music theoretic concept of transpositional equivalence.  

Original reference: Z. Qin, M.J. Buehler, Analysis of the vibrational and sound spectrum of over 100,000 protein structures and application in sonification, Extreme Mechanics Letters, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eml.2019.100460

Sonification of the proteins of the foot and mouth disease virus

Sonification of the Vibrational Spectrum of a Protein Molecule

Can musical composition be used to design new materials? Yes!

This track reflects an AI generated piece, used to design a new protein molecule that doesn't exist in nature. Its folded structure is shown in the track image. A neural network is trained to learn the features of protein design in musical space, and is then used to generate new sequences. 

The music reflects array of dozens of alpha-helical protein segments (cylinders in track image), which are represented by short repetitive notes. They are interrupted by periods of unstructured domains, as is also seen in the protein structure.

AI designed music and translation to de novo protein

We report a self-consistent method to translate amino acid sequences into audible sound, use the representation in the musical space to train a neural network, and then use it to generate new protein designs using artificial intelligence (AI). The sonification method proposed here uses the normal mode vibrations of the amino acid building blocks of proteins to compute an audible representation of each of the 20 natural amino acids, which is fully defined by the overlay of its respective natural vibrations computed using quantum mechanics. 

The vibrational frequencies are transposed to the audible spectrum following the musical concept of transpositional equivalence, playing or writing music in a way that makes it sound higher or lower in pitch while retaining the relationships between tones or chords played. This transposition method ensures that the relative values of the vibrational frequencies within each amino acid and amongst different amino acids are retained. 

The characteristic frequency spectrum and sound associated with each of the amino acids represents a type of musical scale that consists of 20 unique tones, the “amino acid scale”. 

The audio represents a sweep through all 20 natural amino acids:

Alanine 
Arginine 
Asparagine 
Aspartic acid 
Cysteine 
Glutamic acid 
Glutamine 
Glycine 
Histidine 
Isoleucine 
Leucine 
Lysine 
Methionine 
Phenyalanine 
Proline 
Serine 
Threonine 
Tryptophan 
Tyrosine 
Valine 

More on amino acids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid

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