This article was taken from the March 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
For Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go, writing a song is a bit like creating life: "Playing around with the primordial soup of sound, and waiting for that spark." The LA quartet are best known for creating elaborately choreographed music videos, but for their latest project, they are working with UCLA biochemist Sriram Kosuri to encode new album Hungry Ghosts as DNA. "The spirit of everything we do is to find a sandbox and see where the edges are," says Kulash, 39.
Kosuri's lab will convert the zeroes and ones of the digital file into the genetic code of Cs, As, Ts and Gs that make up DNA. It will be created in an electrophoresis machine; fans will be able to buy a vial containing a few nanograms dissolved in water. They can then sequence the code and convert it back into a music file. And, because of DNA's size, a few drops could contain hundreds of thousands of units. "It would be fun to break sales records by selling a single vial," Kulash says.
There are still hurdles to overcome -- US regulations on selling DNA for one, and the challenge of crunching all that data into genetic code. (Kosuri's lab, which previously converted a novel into DNA, is producing a paper on the project.) Then there's the hopeless task of convincing Billboard to recognise DNA as a sales format.
So why not just stick to videos? "It's become chic to say that nerds are the new rock stars," says Kulash. "That being said, I guess we're just nerds."
Hungry Ghosts is released on Feb 16
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
