MuseDNA: A Journey into Musical Genetics

MuseDNA is an interactive command-line application that explores the intersection of music, data science, and bioinformatics. It provides a suite of tools to analyze music, discover its underlying mathematical dynamics, and even use it as a medium for storing and retrieving genetic data with a powerful error-correction system.

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Features

MuseDNA operates as an interactive menu-driven application. Simply run MuseDNA in your terminal to access the following features:

• Encode DNA to Music: Convert a DNA sequence (from a string, .txt, or .fasta file) into a harmonically rich .wav audio file. This process uses a powerful Reed-Solomon Forward Error Correction (FEC) system to ensure data integrity.
• Decode Music to DNA: Decode a previously generated audio file back into its original DNA sequence. The FEC system automatically corrects errors that may have been introduced, ensuring a robust and reliable retrieval of the data.
• Discover Musical DNA (SINDy): Analyzes the sonic features (MFCCs) of any .wav file and uses Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) to discover the system of differential equations that govern its evolution.
• Run Standard Analysis: Performs a classic Music Information Retrieval (MIR) analysis on any .wav file, generating plots for its waveform, spectrogram, chromagram, and MFCCs.
• Generate Random DNA Music: Creates a new piece of music from a randomly generated DNA sequence of a specified length.

Tech Stack

• Python 3.8+
• TUI/CLI: Questionary & Rich
• Audio Processing: Librosa
• Error Correction: Galois (for Reed-Solomon codes)
• Dynamical Systems: PySINDy
• Numerical: NumPy & SciPy

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Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone <your-repo-url>
   cd MuseDNA

2. Create and activate a virtual environment:

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate

3. Install the package in editable mode: This command installs all required dependencies and creates the MuseDNA executable command.

   pip install -e .

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Usage

After installation, you can run the application from anywhere as long as the virtual environment is active.

1. Activate the virtual environment:

   source /path/to/your/MuseDNA/venv/bin/activate

2. Run the application:

   MuseDNA

This will launch the interactive menu. Follow the on-screen prompts to use the various features. All output files (audio and plots) will be saved to the output/ directory by default.