Our preliminary study indicates that DNA sonification is highly suitable for public engagement activities, both for short drop-in events and for more focused workshops.
Doors Open Day was a large public event, during which people engaged well with the sonification activity. The question “Have you ever wondered what DNA would sound like” was a successful way of starting a discussion about DNA. Everyone who was asked this question stayed to listen to a sample of our sonifications and engaged in a short discussion about DNA. Visitors were guided through prepared sonifications, and given the opportunity to go through the printed sonification tutorial. Visitors found the event creative and inspiring and were either happy to see it as a light distraction, or to discuss scientific applications. Relatively little use was made of the Sonic Pi tutorial. During the event, Minecraft proved a distraction, so we discretely removed it from the main menu of each Raspberry Pi. Later, Scratch was also some distraction. For the future, we would remove these in advance because they are not part of our display. URL-based restrictions on Web browser access may also have some value. The Phylo game ran slowly at times on the Raspberry Pi computers (a problem that would be reduced or removed with newer models of the hardware).
The sonification workshops during Ada Lovelace Day were well-attended, and the audience appeared engaged. Six participants completed questionnaires. Others did not, due to leaving early for lunch (1 participant) and leaving at short notice to collect their bags from the main activity room (5 participants). When asked what the best thing about the workshop was, participants stated “The opportunity to engage with DNA or Biology from a different perspective. Hearing a sequence made me think of it as an object in a different way.”; “Sonic Pi (amazing!)”; and “Updating me on sequence investigation”. When asked what the worst thing about the workshop was, participants did not have many comments, i.e. “None”, “Nothing”, “not enough time!”. We had difficulty connecting to the University WiFi network and used a 4G phone as a WiFi hotspot instead. However, this was resolved before participants arrived and was not noticeable to them. The event was a success. However, H.P. and D.B. thought a little more time to focus on sonification would be helpful for such events in the future.
It appears that DNA sonification engages both researchers and the public in thinking about DNA from a different perspective. Further development of DNA sonification for public engagement activities is warranted.
LIMITATIONS
Although our preliminary study is sufficient to suggest DNA sonification has potential in public engagement activities, a larger study would be required to discover the full limits of its successful application, for example in terms of audience age, gender, ethnicity, academic background and in terms of event type. Our audience for evaluation consisted of adults, mostly staff and students at Edinburgh University. We recommend a larger program of qualitative and quantitative analysis, with a diverse range of audiences including young people.
In addition, our sonification has been relatively simple. Future directions involve codon or protein sonification. However, for public engagement, it will be important to avoid strong reliance on biological knowledge which the audience may lack. For example, multiple alignment sonification may be particularly valuable for research (Martin et al, in prep.). But multiple alignment depends on other biological concepts such as homology and cross-sequence comparison, unlikely to be rapidly comprehensible to the general public. The Phylo multiple alignment game [3] is a counter-example. However, as well as an exercise in multiple alignment, Phylo may be understood as a logic puzzle – with the benefit of a link to real data and disease – potentially bypassing these biological concepts for many users while leaving them as useful discussion points for those with expertise in the area.
One promising future direction for public engagement and education may be to highlight the effect of frameshift mutations. We have developed and apply a workshop for biology students in secondary education [15] (open educational resources available at [16]), centred on the GULO gene (e.g. [17]), which in humans is disrupted by frameshift mutations. Visually, a frameshift mutation is difficult to notice on-screen in BLASTN results comparing the GULO coding sequence and the human pseudogene. A frameshift is indicated by a single “-” among DNA symbols.
In conclusion, sonification has a demonstrated potential for public outreach and engagement. Our preliminary efforts to use this methodology were well-received. It is our aspiration to build on these preliminary efforts to use sonification to make DNA sequence information entertaining as well as informative and to increase the nuance and complexity that we convey in public engagement.