Dick Ahlstrom
Two Wexford musicians used advanced genetic analysis software to "manufacture" a pop song. A test panel liked the unique piece and the song's makers wouldn't mind if Louis Walsh had a listen.
Catherine Anglim and Katie Murphy, 17-year-old fifth years from Loreto Secondary School, Wexford Town, both study music and decided to apply this knowledge to the assembly-line production of a popular tune.
"A huge amount of money is put into manufactured bands, their image and sound, but not into the music," Katie said.
"This is an attempt to take manufactured music to a new level," Catherine added.
They studied 100 different songs and distilled them into 50 individual note sequences that were pleasing to the ear, each containing between three and nine notes.
They also analysed sheet music purchasing patterns and websites to identify five very popular and five highly unsuccessful pop songs, to analyse how many of the note sequences these songs contained.
Not surprisingly, the popular tunes had many of the note sequences identified by Catherine and Katie, while the loser songs had very few, or none at all.
The real challenge, however, was finding a way to weight the importance of each note sequence and establish some relationships between them.
For this the two had to turn to bioinformatics software normally used to analyse DNA and protein sequences.
The Research and Education Centre at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, helped them understand the software and they then built relationships between the note sequences by studying relationships between the 20 different amino acids, the building blocks used by the body to make proteins.
The two connected a note sequence with each of the 20 amino acids, attempting to match the amino acid relationships with the note sequence relationships - for example, good pairings, mutually exclusive, a poor match, etc. The result is a new form of pop, a melody built using "music informatics", as the two describe it.
A new kind of house was the aim of Bill Delahoyde, Osgur Long and Oliver Galbraith, three students from East Glendalough School, Wicklow Town. They wanted to design the house of the future, one that comes with the lowest-cost energy bills and the least impact on the environment.
"We investigated all the main types of alternative energy, including geothermal," explains Osgur, a second-year student. "We decided passive solar heating was the best because it is simple, cheap and there are no ongoing costs."
The house would have exceptional levels of underfloor, wall and roof insulation, explained Bill, in third year. "We basically were trying to make the house airtight." For this reason an open fire would be out of the question.
They reconfigured on paper an existing local estate to show how all homes would require a north-south orientation to make the most of solar energy.