In this month’s Nature Medicine podcast, we covered the debut of a choral music piece that incorporates the genetic code of the singers.

“Allele”, composed by Michael Zev Gordon, premiered in July at the Diamond Light Synchrotron in South Oxfordshire, UK. Gordon worked with the poet Ruth Padel — who has her own genetic relationship to science, being Charles Darwin’s great-great-grand-daughter — and with Andrew Morley, an anesthetist at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, who approached the composer with the idea in the first place. The project was funded in part by the Wellcome Trust.

During the composition of the piece, members of the 40-person choir had their blood drawn, and their unique alleles at the RS9 RS3 locus (which encodes for a ribosomal protein) were used to construct their individual voice parts.

Here’s a 5-minute audio clip from a rehearsal of the performance, which features the New London Chamber Choir. Enjoy!

Image courtesy Rebecca Jenkins and the New London Chamber Choir