I thoroughly enjoyed listening to Professor Johnson’s lecture this week involving prions and music. I would never had thought that prions and other biological compounds could be converted into musical tones and notes. Professor Johnson’s presentation showing different sounds associated with prions allowed me to take on a whole new perspective on music and science. While some of the sounds seemed random and disorderly at first, after a while I came to see how music can be created in different ways and how it does not necessarily have to be aesthetically pleasing. I found our discussion on sonification and neurological disorders, such as Creutzfeldth-Jakob disease, very interesting as well, and Texas Wesleyan group’s conversion of prion amino acids groups into music was outstanding. Within music, there is always a level of communication present that is trying to be transcribed across boundaries, and this class truly showed that.
For this assignment, I did two different musical pieces. At first I could not get Audacity and the php program to work, so I went to a piano and decided to musically present the alpha helix structure located within prions. I did this by assigning the three main elements found in alpha helix structures, Carbon, Hydrogen, and Oxygen. I assigned the carbon element to a C chord, followed by hydrogen and oxygen to the subsequent keys relating to their position in the alphabet. I then played these three notes, slowly at first, progressively getting faster as the alpha helix became bigger and wound up tighter.
I finally got Audacity to work so I then did a second piece (since my first one was so short). I took an image of a prion and transferred it to audacity. I then was able to bring out a musical piece resembling a prion (prpc) turning into an infected prion (prpsc). as the piece moves forward, it goes from quiet to more confused, almost as if it getting attacked, until it ends in silence (death)