The earliest published references to genetic music in the scientific literature include a short correspondence by Hayashi and Munakata in Nature in 1984,[1] a publication by geneticist Susumu Ohno and Midori Ohno (his wife and a musician) in Immunogenetics,[2] and a paper in the journal Bioinformatics (then called Computer Applications in the Biosciences) co-authored by Ross D. King and Colin Angus (a member of the British psychedelic band The Shamen) in 1996,[3] Shortly before the King and Angus publication the French physicist and composer Joël Sternheimer (a singer also known by his stage name, Évariste) applied for a patent to use protein music to affect protein synthesis.
[4] The idea that music can affect protein synthesis is generally viewed as pseudoscientific by the molecular biology community, although the methods proposed by Sternheimer form the basis for software called Proteodyne.
The idea that genes and music exhibit similarities was noted even earlier than the scientific publications in the area by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach.
[16] Periodicities and the principle of repetitious recurrences govern many aspects of life on this earth, including musical compositions and coding base sequences in genomes.
In Ohno’s rendition, a space and a line on the octave scale are assigned to each base, A, G, T, and C. His work compares and identifies parallels in genomic sequences and notable music from the early Baroque and Romantic periods.
Indeed, the idea that repetition is key in the formation of functional proteins[16] was central to Ohno's early work in the area of genetic music.