Though I don’t have a musical bone in my body, I’ve been thinking recently about how to code statistical data about people into melodies. Now I find that there’s a whole industry out there of people who are turning DNA into music. If you know anything about your own DNA, you can plug your genes into a programme a play yourself. So maybe I do have music in my bones after all.

One of the people who has been working on this is a young composer in the States, Alexandra Pajak. She’s been busy setting the HIV genome to music. Here’s what she says about her project, courtesy of Bertalan Meskó at ScienceRoll

Sounds of HIV is a musical translation of the genetic code of HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Every segment of the virus is assigned music pitches that correspond to the segment’s scientific properties. In this way, the sounds reflect the true nature of the virus. When listening from beginning to end, the listener hears the entire genome of HIV.

In English, the nucleotides Adenine, Cytosine, Uracil/Thymine, and Guanine are abbreviated with the letters A, C, T, and G. Since A, C, and G are also musical pitches in the Western melodic scale, these pitches were assigned to the matching nucleotides. To form two perfect fifths (C-G and D-A), “D” was arbitrarily assigned to musically represent Uracil. I assigned the pitches of the A minor scale to the amino acids based on their level of attraction to water.

Question: would HIV sound different in a setting like Bali, which uses the seven-tone pelog scale?

Illustration by Wendy Stephenson

Other people get spam e-mails offering them all night erections and a life free of depression. I get offered syphilis diagnostic kits and statistical analysis software. And now, viral art. The sculpture pictured above landed in my in-box from Bioetch — no, that’s not a typo. And I’m passing on to you the chance to buy a drug-attacks-virus paperweight at the discount price of US$ 69.95. With this lyrical description:

“We have used the highest quality green laser to 3D-engrave the HIV-1 protease complexed with indinavir within an optically pure crystal block (2″ x 2″ x 3.1″). The protease structure is rendered using a ribbon diagram and the indinavir structure is offset from the enzyme using a ball-and-stick model. The result is a perfect tool to view the beauty of this enzyme-drug interaction. It also makes a great gift or stylish decoration for your office or desk.”

Hurry. The e-mail tells me there are only 8 left.

These great works have inspired this burst of pseudery from the Centre of Recent Drawing‘s David Gleeson:

“Signed and dated, the images collectively become an acknowledgment of human futility in the face of time as well as a violent record of male sexual drive. Caught and frozen as black-on-white eruptions, these simple auto-drawings plot desire, libidinal drive and sexual economies whilst powerfully evoking mortality and the will to overcome its inevitability. Each one has both an aggressive, chaotic imprint and a fragile delicacy that complement the medium, adding to the body of work by various artists that explores and articulates the notion of the artist as (pro)creator.”

Less pseudy and a great deal more interesting is The Barbican Centre’s Seduced: Art and Sex from antiquity to now. If you haven’t seen it and you’re in London (oh, and you’re over 18), get your skates on: the exhibition ends next week. In Paris (if you’re over the sightly more tender age of 16), check out the Bibliotheque Nationale’s L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque: Eros au secret. It’s an exhibition of all the things that have been locked out of public view for fear of disrupting national morals. That wouldn’t include the sex life of President Nicolas Sarkozy, then.