Over the last month, I have spent much of my time helping to develop a new website for the UC Davis Genome Center (a site which will hopefully be launched very soon). In trying to bring the website into the modern era, I've been trying to set things up so that we can better promote any news that arises from the work of the talented faculty, staff, and students that we have.

In particular, I'm keen to feature some video clips on the new site, and that made me think that we should have our own Genome Center 'ident' to use in any videos. Idents are a bit like stingers on radio stations, something that gives an audio signature that people might come to recognize (and maybe even like).

I have a smattering of music knowledge so I thought it might be fun to create something based on DNA. As there are four canonical DNA bases (A, C, G, and T), I thought that the musical motif should have four principle notes. I then decided to arrange the notes with musical intervals based on the intervals between the alphabet positions of A, C, G, and T. If you start this sequence on a C note, you end up with C, D, F# and G (one octave up). This progression feels like it needs to be resolved, and a basic G major chord seems to work.

So this is what I have come up with so far. This may end up being vetoed by the powers-that-be, but I'm still pretty happy with it:

Update: just to add that this piece was made entirely using GarageBand on my Mac. There are: three tracks that use Classic Electric Piano (I was using the onscreen keyboard which is why I ended up doing these as three separate tracks); one Tonewheel Organ track; one Upright Studio Bass track; one Classic Analog Pad track; and one String Ensemble track. The latter three tracks combine to form the final chord.