music-of-the-sars

Encoding the complete genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as a MIDI file

Dependencies

• Python (3.8.1)
• pip3 install mido

Download

git clone --recursive https://github.com/JeffIrwin/music-of-the-sars
cd music-of-the-sars

Run

python sars.py sars-cov-2-genome.txt

Sample output

See https://soundcloud.com/jirwin505/sars-cov-2-genome

References

The SARS-CoV-2 genome was taken from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN908947.3

My God! What have I done?

SARS-CoV-2 has four genomic bases, A, C, G, and T. These can be interpreted as the numbers 0 through 3. Taking each group of two genomic bases, there are 16 combinations:

AA -> 0
AC -> 1
AG -> 2
AT -> 3

CA -> 4
CC -> 5
CG -> 6
CT -> 7

GA -> 8
GC -> 9
GG -> 10
GT -> 11

TA -> 12
TC -> 13
TG -> 14
TT -> 15

Ok, I actually used the opposite endianness, but that's an unimportant implementation detail.

With a little artistic interpretation, we can map this to a 16 note scale:

The complete SARS-CoV-2 genome has about 30 kb (kilobases), so this gives us about 15,000 notes of "music".