From National Public Radio Morning Edition
"What Does DNA Sound Like?"
This, in essence, was the question NPR Senior Science
Editor Anne
Gudenkauf asked several months ago during a meeting about
NPR's
coverage of the Human Genome Project. "What's the
best way" she
asked, "to explain to our audience -- in the language
of radio -- how genes
work, and why decoding them even matters?" A good
question. To talk
about genes in the "language of radio" means to
use -- fully and
imaginatively -- the two major tools of a radio
journalist: words and
sounds. Finding the words would be easy. But where would
we find the
sounds? Do chromosomes make noise, assuming you can even
get
close enough to hear them? What does DNA sound like?
Listen as NPR's Alex Chadwick and Richard Harris attempt
to answer
the question.
After some debate, we decided genes could
"speak" on the radio only if
they were large enough to be heard. We agreed that one way
to
"enlarge" them was to literally build a giant,
human "cell" that could be
fully explored by NPR Science correspondent Richard Harris
and NPR
world traveler, Alex Chadwick. With the expert guidance of
molecular
biologist Susan Myers, we converted NPR's Studio 3A into a
"cell" in
the upper digestive tract, complete with hanging
ornaments, dozens of
inflatable objects, and 46 brightly colored skeins of yarn
to represent
chromosomes. An NPR audio technician recorded Chadwick and
Harris as they made their way, by flashlight, through the
darkened
studio-cell. Then came the fun part: finding the sounds to
add to the
words.
Since we were trying to portray a living system, I made an
inventory of
NPR's already-recorded sounds of living things, including
ambience
collected on several of Alex Chadwick's (actual)
expeditions around the
world. As a result, many of the effects in Chadwick and
Harris'
imaginary cell expedition are digitally altered sounds of
whales, bees,
birds, and people.
Human voices turned out to be especially useful for
producing a wide
variety of sounds, including of course, the DNA code
itself. (What does
DNA sound like? Perhaps it sounds like four Morning
Edition staffers
murmering the nucloetides "G-A-T-C" over and
over again
into a microphone, with digital processing added to make
it
sound a little less human, a little more cellular.
On another occassion, I convinced an even larger group of
people to
record a full repertoire of silly mouth sounds -- the kind
that children
usually get scolded for making in grade school. With some
digital nips
and tucks (and some muffled guffaws edited out), these
sounds
provided the cell background ambience, and the rain-like
popping
noises at the end of the piece, as the cell vessicle fills
up with lactase. I
also ventured into the studio myself to see what kinds of
"traveling"
sounds I could produce with a drinking straw; my
ill-mannered slurps
were digitally processed to produce the sounds of enzymes
and messenger
RNA migrating from one part of the cell to another.
In many respects, putting a cell on the radio is like
trying to make a
movie out of a famous novel; listeners, particularly
biologists, will surely
have their own opinions of what DNA, a ribosome or a
nucleus should
sound like. But at the very least, I hope this project has
revealed some
of the mystery in genes, and a trace of the music in DNA.
- Neva Grant
Reporters: Richard Harris and Alex Chadwick
Producer: Neva Grant, (Senior Producer, Morning Edition)
Audio Technicians: Peter Elena (recording) , Andy
Rosenberg (mixing), Linda
Mack (post-production)
Inspiration: Anne Gudenkauf (Senior Editor, NPR Science
Desk)
Cell Biology Consultant: Dr. Susan Myers
back to electrogenetics: rebuttal to this
article
back to electrogenetics home