Catalog of Rare Diseases

An interactive sonification of 230 rare diseases

Click a disease category to zoom in, or in the center of the circle to zoom out.

Or, press "play" to hear a performance by electric violinist Rudolf Haken, going through each disease automatically (works best on Firefox or Chrome).

Twelve different categories of disease are each associated with a different chakra, or scale, derived from the Melakarta ragams in Indian classical music. Each chakra's lower half (or tetrachord) provides the harmonic background for each disease category; the upper tetrachord represents the four DNA bases (ACTG), which play a portion of the DNA promoter sequence for each disease. The amount of DNA letters played depends on the number of genes associated with each disease. This 2023 conference paper has more details.