Jazz or Flamenco?

[brownie]

And music improves with wine!

I have been doing a private and very personal search on the subject for the past few years - although I tend to shy away from relaxing jazz - so I was not really surprised when I found this on the AP wire overnight:

 

'Jazz or flamenco?' Spanish winemaker asks his yeast

By Associated Press

MADRID, Spain - Plants like being talked to, right? Well, Spanish researchers want to know if yeast used to age sherry grows better with music loosely based on its own DNA.

      This odd marriage of wine and song is too young for a firm verdict, but there are hints the yeast likes it. The yeast cells floating to the top of wine casks to cushion against the damaging effects of air seem more organized.

      ``The more uniform and thicker the layer, the better, because the wine is more protected,'' the lead researcher, enologist Maria Isabel Estevez, said in Associated Press interview Tuesday. She stressed, however, that the data is only preliminary.

      Turning genes - human and microbic - into music is the brainchild of a team led by Aurora Sanchez Sousa, a piano-playing microbiologist at Madrid's Ramon y Cajal Hospital.

      Intrigued by the effect music has on people's moods, last year the team transformed snippets of genetic code into music by arbitrarily assigning tones from the do-re-mi scale to four key building blocks of DNA's double helix.

      The exercise was just for fun, and yielded what the team called an audio version of the blueprint for life.

      Those four units are called nucleotides, and distinguished by which of four bases they contain - adenine, guanine, thymine or cytosine. Thus, a string of code that reads, say, AGCTATACGAT, for a geneticist became the base line of music that Sanchez Sousa and a team of professionals embellished with melodies.

      The resulting 10-tune CD and a later work from Sanchez Sousa's team pleased Spanish sherry mogul Jose Estevez so much he got to thinking.

      If yeast cells that turn sugar into alcohol are affected by external factors like temperature and humidity, and the cells are just as alive as musically vulnerable humans, might not there be one more way to keep the yeast happy?

      ``He asked if music might not also affect his wines,'' Sanchez Sousa said in an interview.

      So her team translated yeast genes into four songs, and composed one more tune based on Estevez's own DNA. ``It has a sort of Andalusian flair,'' she said, alluding to the flamenco-rich southern region that is Estevez's home and the hub of Spain's sherry industry. One of the yeast songs has a jazzy slant.

      Enter the winemakers. At the Estevez vineyard in Jerez de la Frontera in southern Spain, speakers were hung from the ceiling of a warehouse where casks of sherry age.

      For the past two months, the yeast-gene music has played softly over those speakers everyday from about 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., said enologist Estevez, the boss's daughter.

      ``The music is beautiful,'' she said. ``It is a very pleasant, relaxing melody.''

      Inside the casks, yeast floats to the top and forms a milky-white layer that protects the wine from the damaging effects of oxygen. And lo and behold, the yeast does seem to be reacting to the soothing sound of its own DNA.

      With music, that layer seems to be uniform, compared to the more scattershot formation of yeast subjected to silence, Estevez said.

      She stressed the data is nowhere near enough for a firm conclusion. The sherry being tinkered with needs to age for three years, and the music only just started.

      ``We have a lot to investigate,'' she said. ``This will take time.''

      A leading Spanish winemaker from outside the project noted there was no scientific literature to compare it against, but said it still seemed worth pursuing.

      ``At first glance it seems a bit strange,'' said Carlos Bujanda Fernandez de Pierola, chief winemaker and owner of a vineyard named after him in Rioja, Spain's main winemaking region.

      But past research has focused on how organisms' reproductive mechanisms respond to music and other stimuli. ``And studying that angle is interesting, too, because you always have to discover things and behaviors we do not know about,'' he said.

[couw]

http://www.genomamusic.com/