Darwin Day in Norwich – Pictures‘n’Posts

David explaining the dangers of 'going ape' in 1860's Oxford 

A fun day at the Quadram Institute in Norwich to celebrate Darwin Day a week ago today, just after the great man’s birthday (12^th). 

A good sized audience heard a historical/literary talk from Dr Jude Piesse (Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK) “The ghost in the garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden” and Dr Anders Bergstrom (School of Biological Sciences, UEA, Norwich, UK) with the talk “The Call of the Wild: the Genetic History of Wolves & Dogs” before listening to my “The Eyenigma Variations: Darwin, DNA & Music. Eyenigma is a recreation of the famous ‘Huxley Debate’ of 1860 at the newly constructed Oxford Museum of Natural History (see above), a building intended to present Science as “Facts, Connected, Illuminated, Interpreted, so as to become the Intelligible Embodied Expression to his Creatures of the Will of God” (Acland). The debate became one of the most celebrated punch-ups in science, which I hope I conveyed in the music (first performed in the Museum in 2015). I finished the talk with three minutes of the finale of the quartet accompanied by a slide-video depicting the journey from “one very simple and imperfect” (Origin, Chapter 6) to a perfect and complex eye, and ending with the audience shouting "STOP" at the STOP codon (the last bar). Nice to have audience participation in a string quartet. My thanks to professor Dan-Eric Nilsson of Lund University for allowing me to use images from his lecture on the subject. You can here the last three minutes of Eyenigma here and see Dan’s full lecture here.

No space to describe the full talk here, and the genetic basis of the music, but it was fun to digress into Douglas Hofstadter’s (birthday: yesterday 19^th Feb!) first proposal of DNA music in 1979 which inspired so many, including Dave Deamer whom I used as the first example of published DNA music. Check out his composition and video of the Insulin gene here.

Eyenigma Intro video - codes

'One very simple' - melatonin, then rhodopsin, the first light sensors

Picture credits:  David Gahan & Mark Pallen

Video credits: Dave & Nick Deamer (follow link, used with permission) and David Gahan 

The Super Ape: date change!

 

...Is Us. Reggae, Dub & performance poetry below

Last post, I’d just been asked to give a talk for International Darwin Day at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, Quadram Institute on 13^th Feb (date change from 10th due to INDUSTRIAL ACTION). This free event has now been posted (LINK SHOWS INCORRECT DATE, but booking site will be fine) as one of seventeen events from Brazil, Mexico (US x 8), through Germany and Novosibirsk, Russia (more on this excellent group later). I’ll be giving a talk inspired by the cult classic Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter, 1979) - about codes in music and how DNA can be represented, drawing on other composers’ efforts and using a useful trick from my biochemical past! A fair amount of genetics with a bit of music-theory added. I’ll be posting a new music video on Soundcloud to mark the occasion.

The event, organised by Profs. Tracey Chapman & Mark Pallen, will feature talks on “The ghost in the garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden” (Dr Jude Piesse) and “The Call of the Wild: the genomic history of wolves and dogs” (Dr Anders Bergstrom). Mark is an international expert on high-throughput sequencing to problems in microbiology and ancient DNA research, and old hand at giving popular lectures on Darwin & Evolution. Here’s a saucy one from the Institute’s 2020 Darwin Day events, giving all the scuttlebutt (lovely American term) you’ll ever need on C.D. He’s also the author of the Rough Guide to Evolution (2008) which contains a section on music related to Darwin. A lot has happened since 2008 (stimulated by the 150^th anniversary of ‘Origin’ in 2009) so probably will need an update; but in the meantime it’s a main theme of this blog so keep on reading!

One delight of finding all this science-arts-culture fostered by Tracey & Mark at Quadram was discovering performance poet (& science-writer, &&&…) Peter Bickerton, the Juggling Doctor. Peter gave a great reading of his piece Super Ape at Quadram in 2019, a video of it here. Wow, in a grand sweep (see my blog entry Arthur C. Clarke for comparison), he arcs our story from big-bang to extinction. Millenial-millenarianism?  Why not? Of course it’s painted in topical concerns, images and thought-patterns of our age (whadja want? Biblical style?), but that’s what gives it colour and fun; oh, and the really cool Jamaican Reggae / Dub from The Upsetters (1976). In a blog whose twin themes are evolution and music this was a great find. I’ll post at a later date about more Evolution-Dub!

Other Composers do DNA Music (2)!

Back to music! Following the performance of my quartet Eyenigma Variations (extract here) where one of the principal themes is a melody derived from the DNA of the most basic Eye (receptor) protein, I’d like to do a post about other composers doing DNA & other codes in music. Please comment if you'd like to highlight others!

In the beginning was the Book: Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter, 1979), “A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll”; you can tell that there are devious codes in there right from the start! Although really about the mind emerging from self-referencing in brain circuits, there are beautiful digressions about self-referencing in maths and music. Enter B-A-C-H, both the composer and his musical self-reference in The Art of Fugue. The BACH code pervades Eyenigma, as well.

H? What’s H in music? At the time in Germany, H was just ordinary B – so what was B then? why B ♭ of course! Just shows you can make any rule, as long as you stick with it. But Bach has started a trend to code names in music. Dmitri SCHostakovich stretched a point by coding the bolded letters as D-E♭ -C-B (there’s that H = B thing again, and a weird letter sound eSS becoming E♭). So I bunged that one in as well, Eyenigma bars 192/3. (One day, I’ll do myself as DFG(AHA)^N (the ‘to the N’ would be a trill).

Douglas Hofstadter couldn’t resist the idea that ‘DNA makes DNA’, referencing itself with the letters GATC (Guanine, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine) - and makes all living things as part of that loop (the phenotype provides the energy and materials).  Give-or-take a ‘T’, that looks musical, similar to the BACH code. DaveDeamer, Prof. at University of California Santa Cruz, inventor of the latest DNA wonder technology and now doing amazing work on Darwin’s ‘warm pond’ origin of life theory, thought the same in 1992: see his Wonderfest lecture here. He uses GAC but assigns the note E to thymine. This gives four notes either in major sixth (CEGA) or minor seventh (ACEG) chords, both loved by jazz improvisers ‘cos everything sounds good with these notes. It’s a great choice if you want direct translation of DNA strings and don’t mind the ‘goes on forever’ aspect. I’ll post more about Dave’s later DNA musical activities in the future.

Dave proposed expanding the idea to choosing notes for amino acids which would give twenty notes instead of four. This idea has been expanded by Markus Buehler at MIT – here’s his Soundcloud page. Sounds pretty good (what do you think?) but again uses the direct translation method so not much for a human composer to do!

In my setting of rhodopsin, I’d used the translation of T = B (see oldest/first post in this blog). That gave a ‘leading note’, one of the two semitone intervals in the diatonic scale (eg E to F, B to C) which allows a melody to arrive somewhere. I also used the principle of ‘third letter redundancy’ which allows a composer some harmonic control but ends of with the same end results – see Evolution of Redundancy in the Genetic Code. This gave the first theme (melody) in Eyenigma ; you hear it on the ‘cello in the extract.

Another composer who has written a genetic string quartet is Deirdre Gribbin – ‘Hearing your Genes Evolve’. This is a great example of starting from a DNA translation base but using absolutely contemporary compositional skills to get a fully satisfying result from simple ideas (I used a more classical Variations structure to tell the story I wanted of the ‘Eye Debate’ of 1860). I’d love to know what ‘rule’s Deirdre uses – hopefully she’ll tell me!

Gregory Brown has also used DNA derived ideas in his Missa Charles Darwin. I wrote about this in my 'Evolution Day' (24th November) post.

Picture credit: DNA-MUSIC Abhijit Bhaduri, Flickr CC

Eyenigma Variations first public performance

 

Eyenigma Variations: first public performance Saturday 29th October 2022 at Darwin College Cambridge

I'm delighted to say that the first public performance of 'Eyenigma Variations' (1.1) will take place at: The Darwins and Music: A Concert (Darwin College), Cambridge University Library as part of and with the support of Cambridge University Libraries exhibition, Darwin in Conversation: The Endlessly Curious Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (Saturday 9 July-Saturday 3 December). 

If you are attending and want to hum along with some of the sections based on Chapter 6, 'Origin of Species' (First Edition), the phrases depicted in music are: 

"Difficulties on the theory"- this becomes an opening rhythm in 'Morse Code': you can mutter along to this in a worried fashion. 

"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances [pizzicato] for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. [dance] Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist... [tranquillo]" 

."..the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection...and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man? [coda]" 

It's 'music a scientist might write': I hope you like it.

Eyenigma Variations: A Fantasia on Codes for String Quartet

 

 

‘Eyenigma Variations’ quartet is based on themes from my choral settings of passages from Origin of Species, Voyage of the Beagle and Autobiography by Charles Darwin. I began collecting them in March 2008 when, after hearing a modern concert setting of a bloodthirsty passage from Isaiah, a Guardian pamphlet reproducing famous passages from the Origin literally dropped into my lap. I wondered why no-one had – apparently – tried to set the grandeur of Darwin’s world view in a musical context. 

Darwin faced head-on the gravest ‘Difficulties on the Theory’ in Chapter VI of Origin: ‘Organs of Extreme Perfection’ – of which the Eye was his prime example, the equivalent of Paley’s watch. I found a musical start-point in mid-Victorian creationist hymns, written to counter the free-thinking evolutionist current of the time. Darwin had no clear idea of a mechanism of heredity and variation and had to rely on an intellectual faith that something would turn up ex machina. He posits that an eye ‘very imperfect and simple’ might have existed: and we now know the simplest version would be a photoreceptor protein such as rhodopsin. On hearing the bell-ringers of my local church I was reminded of G’s, A’s and C’s used to notate both the musical scale and the genetic code and looked up the published code sequence for rhodopsin. 

Rhodopsin photo-receptor protein

 

The genetic code is arranged in threes – which give a natural jig or waltz rhythm.  Guanine, Adenine and Cytosine give an obvious mapping of G,A,C, but Thymine is a free choice. I thought that T sounded like ‘Ti’ in do-re-mi which would be ‘B’ in C-major: hence G,A,B,C.  To make it more musical and avoid the tedium of the apparently random natural sequence, I used a feature of the genetic code which allows mutation without changing the end result. It is usually possible to change the third letter (or note) in every three and still produce a valid ‘variation’ on rhodopsin, but one staying in a musical harmony! So a short section of the eye-protein sequence could produce melody, harmony and rhythm. 

I saw a delicious opportunity for a dialogue between mutations on a creation-upholding hymn-tune, Bright and Beautiful, and a theme derived from a genetic explanation for something Darwin had to take on faith: that there was an underlying encoding to explain heredity and variation. The association of codes with music, especially the insertion by BACH of his own name in The Art of Fugue (celebrated by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach), seemed to demand its place to represent the traditional world-view, given Bach’s central place in faith-based music. And so the various coded musical elements in Eyenigma engage in a continuing debate, for which a string quartet seemed the most appropriate form. The work ends in closing statements from both sides with the BACH theme providing the final cadence but finishing in the final bar with my note-rendition of Thymine, Adenine, Guanine (T-A-G): the genetic code for STOP, THE END.

‘Eyenigma’ was performed amongst the dinosaurs in the Oxford Museum of Natural History in September 2015 at a private university function with the generous help of Professor Ian Brown, and honouring the famous Oxford Debate of 1860 which took place in the same building.