Musical Genes - 2020 Shiny Contest Submission

Musical Genes

Authors: Rayna Harris, Rebecca Calisi
Working with Shiny < 1 year

Abstract: A Shiny app for the visualization and sonification of the gene expression during parental care.

Full Description: Genes work together in concert to regulate behavior. What does this 'transcriptional symphony' sound like? Data sonification is the presentation of data as sound. Musical Genes is a Shiny app that allows users to interactively visualize and sonify (or plot and play) gene expression to better understand the biology of parental care. The user can choose a gene from this pulldown menu and listen to how it changes over time with the R packages sonify and tuneR. We also represent the levels of gene expression as notes on a scale that could be played on an instrument like a piano or guitar. Finally, we provide additional visualizations that provide insight into genes that might work in concert to regulate biological processes of biomedical relevance. Exploration of this data could provide additional insights of biological processes that of biomedical relevance all while making beautiful music.


Category: Research
Keywords: reproducible research, neuroscience, animal behavior, transcriptomics, music
Shiny app: https://raynamharris.shinyapps.io/musicalgenes/
Repo: GitHub - raynamharris/musicalgenes: from gene expression counts to sounds in R
RStudio Cloud: Posit Cloud

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