Pajak, who is a graduate student in clinical social work at the University of Georgia and composes the music in her spare time.But really, what of the idea of providing compassion, comfort, knowledge that people are thinking about this deadly killer... for a long time HIV/AIDs sat silently as a disease of stigma. The victims relegated to the farthest reaches of so much of societies collective mind, kept as far away as possible... in the fringes, on the outside, always 'the other', considering that this could bring the killer into the room, into people's homes, down to earth; manageable?
*On July 21, 356 BC, Herostratus in his quest for fame set fire to the Temple at Ephesus in what is now Turkey. The temple was constructed of marble and considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. It had been built by King Croesus of Lydia to replace an older site destroyed during a flood and honoring a local goddess conflated by the Greeks with Artemis, their goddess of the hunt, the wild and childbirth. Measuring 130 metres long (425 feet) and supported by columns 18 metres high (60 feet), it was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
A story about a misanthropic man who resolves to follow the path of *Herostratus and make history by means of an evil deed -- in this case, by killing six random people (one for each bullet in his revolver). The man is exhilarated by the sense of power he receives when carrying his revolver on the streets within his pocket. "But I no longer drew assurance from that [the revolver], it was from myself: I was a being like a revolver, a torpedo or a bomb." Sartre gives the reader an insightful account about how a man's nature changes with the objects of his possession, but the object itself is unable to change the internal man, as seen in the conclusion.
"I just have to think up some instrumentation, some rhythms, the tempo," she adds(it is possible she meant "...by using an algorithm", but it would seem that she has experience and skill at composition, and might not have left these choices up to an algorithm generator)
I'll give the short answer to the question »what is humanities computing?« up front: it is foreshadowed by my two epigraphs. Humanities computing is a practice of representation, a form of modeling or, as Wallace Stevens has it, mimicry. It is also (as Davis and his co-authors put it) a way of reasoning and a set of ontological commitments, and its representational practice is shaped by the need for efficient computation on the one hand, and for human communication on the other. We'll come back to these ideas, but before we do, let's stop for a moment to consider why one would ask a question such as »what is humanities computing?«
First, I think the question arises because it is important to distinguish a tool from the various uses that can be made of it, if for no other reason than to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool for different purposes. A hammer is very good nail-driver, not such a good screw-driver, a fairly effective weapon, and a lousy musical instrument. Because the computer is – much more than the hammer – a general-purpose machine (in fact, a general-purpose modeling machine) it tends to blur distinctions among the different activities it enables. Are we word-processing or doing email? Are we doing research or shopping? Are we entertaining ourselves or working? It's all data: isn't it all just data processing? Sure it is, and no it isn't. The goals, rhetoric, consequences, benefits, of the various things we do with computers are not the same, in spite of the hegemony of Windows and the Web. All our activities may all look the same, and they may all take place in the same interface, the same ›discourse universe‹ of icons, menus, and behaviors, but they're not all equally valuable, they don't all work on the same assumptions – they're not, in fact, interchangeable. To put a more narrowly academic focus on all this, I would hazard a guess that everyone reading this uses a word-processor and email as basic tools of the profession, and I expect that many readers are also in the humanities. Even so, you do not all do humanities computing – nor should you, for heaven's sake – any more than you should all be medievalists, or modernists, or linguists.
....
I. Humanities computing as model or mimicry
Davis et al. use the term »surrogate« instead of »mimicry« or »model«. Here's what they say about surrogates:
The first question about any surrogate is its intended identity: what is it a surrogate for? There must be some form of correspondence specified between the surrogate and its intended referent in the world; the correspondence is the semantics for the representation. The second question is fidelity: how close is the surrogate to the real thing? What attributes of the original does it capture and make explicit, and which does it omit? Perfect fidelity is in general impossible, both in practice and in principle. It is impossible in principle because any thing other than the thing itself is necessarily different from the thing itself (in location if nothing else). Put the other way around, the only completely accurate representation of an object is the object itself. All other representations are inaccurate; they inevitably contain simplifying assumptions and possibly artifacts.[4]
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Ever since the 1970s, when Iannis Xenakis began composing music based on mathematics, architecture, and physics, science and music have been trying to find common ground. In October, University of Georgia graduate student Alexandra Pajak will become part of that rapprochement of music and science when she releases an album of original music that she composed based on the DNA of HIV, she told the Daily Scan. "Sounds of HIV is a musical translation of the genetic code of HIV," Pajak's liner notes read. "Every segment of the virus is assigned music pitches that correspond to the segment's scientific properties." Pajak has assigned certain notes and pitches to specific amino acids and nucleotides. The composition's Prelude and Postlude correspond to the first and last 100 nucleotides, and the sections named after the proteins (Proteins 1-9) represent translations of the amino acid sequences, she says. Pajak got the idea to compose DNA-based music when, as an undergrad, a genetics professor asked her to compose a symphony based on the DNA of the college founder's mother. At various conferences ever since, several researchers have commissioned CDs from her, she says. Pajak is currently recording with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and part of the sales proceeds will go to the Emory Vaccine Center, which conducts HIV research.
Kinexus Bioinformatics has converted the amino acid sequences and corresponding DNA sequences of the following 12 cell signalling proteins (EGF Receptor, PI 3-Kinase, PTP-1B Phosphatase, VHI-related Phosphatase, PP2B/Calcineurin, Phospholipase A2, PI-specific PLC, cGMP Phosphodiesterase, Adenylate Cyclase, Gi-α1 G Protein, H-Ras, and Caspase 8) into musical notes to produce a unique melody for each protein. The soundtracks are based on the hydrophobicity scores of the amino acids in the primary structure of each protein; the more hydrophilic the amino acid, the higher the musical note that was assigned. The melody notes are of amino acids and background music is of the corresponding DNA. Different scales and tempos were used for the proteins and a selection of different instruments were also employed. The soundtracks were produced by Dr. William Campbell and are freely available for download from the following url: http://www.kinexus.ca/scienceTechnology/gallery/music/music.html
Kinexus has converted the amino acid sequences and corresponding DNA sequences of the following 12 cell signaling proteins (EGF Receptor, PI 3-Kinase, PTP-1B Phosphatase, VHI-related Phosphatase, PP2B/Calcineurin, Phospholipase A2, PI-specific PLC, cGMP Phosphodiesterase, Adenylate Cyclase, Gi-α1 G Protein, H-Ras, and Caspase 8) into musical notes to produce a unique melody for each protein. The soundtracks are based on the hydrophobicity scores of the amino acids in the primary structure of each protein; the more hydrophilic the amino acid, the higher the musical note that was assigned. The melody notes are of amino acids and background music is of the corresponding DNA. Different scales and tempos were used for the proteins and a selection of different instruments were also employed. The soundtracks were produced by Dr. William Campbell.
posted by infinite intimation at 8:08 AM on November 12, 2010