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Scientists create the perfect music for cats

We all know how therapeutic and soothing (or on the contrary, motivating) music can be; and we all know that different people like different types of music... so it seems safe to say that different animals also like different types of music. Now, a joint team of scientists and musicians believe they found how to compose the purr-fect music for animals, including monkeys and cats.

Why Stradivarius violins sound so good. Hint: It's the f-shape

New research offers new insight into the golden sound of Stradivarius violins.

How a musician and his robots improvise together

In the video above, you can see PhD student Mason Bretan from the Robot Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech in the US jam with some of the robots he helped create. The robots got rhythm, and they got the skills. Just look at that amazing marimba solo at the middle of the video – that was completely […]

Listening to music you like makes you more altruistic

Music is almost ubiquitous in our lives – we hear it in commercials, in the car, on the radio, at the movies, when you go out, when you stay in… we’re quite a musical society nowadays. But we still don’t understand many things about how music affects our bodies and our brains; now, a new […]

Your Taste in Music Might Reveal How Dumb (or Smart) You Are

Virgil Griffith, a student at Caltech, embarked on a most interesting project to seek whether there’s any connection between the music you enjoy and, uhm, your intellectual abilities.  Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools. This allowed him […]

How loud music damages your hearing

Listening to loud music has been shown time and time again to affect hearing in a negative way. The damage becomes more pronounced with age, leading to difficulties in understanding speech. A new analytic study by researchers at University of Leicester  examined the cellular mechanisms that underlie hearing loss and tinnitus triggered by exposure to loud […]

Why people love it when the bass drops

Rave parties go crazy when the bass drops, no doubt about it, but what makes people click so well with low frequencies? Canadian scientists at the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind investigated how our brains react to low-freq pitches and found our affinity has to do with how humans detect rhythm. Basically, the bass is […]

Musical training doesn't make you smarter, but that doesn't mean it's not important

Playing an instrument comes with a wide range of benefits, especially for children. It teaches them discipline and how to focus on an important task at hand. It also fuels creativity. There’s a well constructed myth, however, that playing an instrument makes you smarter, as in it improves your cognitive abilities somehow. This idea is […]

Capturing music from the stars

Musica Universalis or Music of the Spheres is an philosophical concept which portrays the proportions in the movement of the celestial bodies – the sun, planets, stars and so on – as a form of music. These observable patterns aren’t quite musical, since they lack harmony, but the idea itself has influenced a great of […]

Learning to play a musical instrument doesn't make you smarter, study finds

There seems to be a general belief, especially among parents, that if you send children to music lessons the experience will make them smarter. However, a group of researchers at  University of Toronto, intrigued  by this highly thrown about, yet never proven, link between the two conducted a study to see if this belief genuinely holds. Their findings suggest, […]

What makes a song 'catchy' - science explains

Learn what are the elements identified by science that make a catchy tune.

Complex simplicity is the best for music

Art and science almost always seem to be standing at opposite seats of the table, so it’s really hard to explain one through the means of the other. But if we were to look at some of the best compositions in the world, music that transcended time and delighted generations and generations, what would we […]

The neurobiology of music

Music has traditionally been something scientists have found hard to characterize – it is basically a form of social communication between individuals, and whether you’re humming the song from a commercial or soloing around Hendrix style you are communicating, expressing something. If done by parents around infants, it attaches the little ones to them and […]

Infants detect the beat in music 2 days after birth

You’ve grown tired of hearing one of your friends telling you he’s got the music in his blood since the day he was born and you sigh. You’d probably be surprised to find out that a new study proves he is totally right. Unfortunately for him though, there’s nothing special about that: every 2 or […]
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