A conceptual research artefact exploring genetics, regulation, and biological patterning through music and sound-based inquiry.
Context
Post-Mendelian emerged as an exploratory inquiry into how genetic concepts could be approached beyond purely textual or diagrammatic representation. Rather than attempting to sonify data directly at the outset, this project began as a conceptual investigation – using music as a cognitive and aesthetic medium to engage ideas of inheritance, regulation, variation, and expression.
The work coincided ongoing studies in clinical nutrition and nutrigenomics, where questions of genotype–phenotype relationships, regulatory mechanisms, and biological variability were increasingly central. Music offered a way to hold these ideas simultaneously: sequential yet layered, structured yet fluid.
Conceptual Framework
The project draws from foundational genetic principles – such as the central dogma, gene regulation, and post-Mendelian patterns of inheritance – while framing them through musical structure and symbolic correlation. These mappings were not intended as literal explanations, but as heuristic devices to support intuition, memory, and pattern recognition.
Analogies between biological systems and musical form – sequence, repetition, modulation, constraint, and variation – were used to explore how complex processes might be perceived rather than calculated. Syncretic references drawn from cosmology and symbolic systems functioned as orienting metaphors, allowing multiple scales of organization to be held in parallel out collapsing into reductionism.
Method
Post-Mendelian was developed primarily as an artistic–conceptual process rather than a data-driven sonification project. Musical ideas were composed to reflect genetic themes – regulation, activation, suppression, and expression – using groove, harmony, texture, and form as proxies for biological behavior.
During this phase, limitations of purely symbolic mapping became evident. While concept-driven composition supported insight and recall, it also highlighted the need for more direct engagement genetic sequence itself. This recognition laid the groundwork for subsequent experiments in DNA-to-sound translation.
Outcomes and Transitions
Post-Mendelian functioned as a transitional artefact. It clarified both the potential and the limitations of metaphor-based approaches to biological inquiry through music and sound. The project catalyzed early experiments in DNA sonification, where genetic sequences began to inform musical material more directly.
These explorations evolved into the Genetic Soundbank project, which focuses on translating genetic data into structured sonic environments. Further development of these ideas led to more complex, network-oriented investigations, including Polysynaptic Reflex Archestra, where multi-layered signaling and neural-style interactions became central themes.
Status
Post-Mendelian is presented as an exploratory research artefact. While grounded in established scientific concepts, its primary function is conceptual and interpretive rather than explanatory or clinical. The work serves as a foundation for subsequent investigations rather than a conclusive statement.
The Post-Mendelian project also exists as a musical research artefact, presented in the Music catalogue.
Related research trajectories: Genetic Soundbank · Polysynaptic Reflex Archestra