Claire Lee – Looking Outwards – 04

I have always had a deep appreciation for the products of the intersection between art and biology. However, I’d only ever seen visual examples of this genre of work, so I was really excited and fascinated by Pierry Jacquillard’s Prélude in ACGT, a piece that takes the A-C-G-T (adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine) order of Jacquillard’s own DNA and uses a Javascript-based program to convert it into the musical notes A, C, G, and T to a musical score. I really admired the concept of combining biology and music to create an organically generated musical piece that also holds deep meaning for an individual in regards to his own identity.

“This Prelude is important for me, as the technological advances are taking any data (including music) and turn them into DNA in order to save them for almost eternity as they promise. But for me, the most important is more the interpretation of a code rather than the materialism of the code itself. I think that maybe we are just generating data that will last centuries but the key to retrieve them won’t. They could be a kind of post-digital hieroglyphs.” 

Pierry Jacquillard

The algorithm that generated the work is written in JavaScript, using a midi library that generates signals to be converted into electronic sounds. I suppose that the DNA analysis is done outside of the code, but that the program takes the DNA analysis information and converts the A, C, G, and T to corresponding sound files. I believe that conceptually, this work is very simple, but that the concept in itself is very creative.