The acoustic vibrations from pop and rock music can improve the performance of solar cells by as much as 40 percent, say scientists from Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College London. The solar cells used in the study were comprised of billions of nanorods made from zinc oxide, which were then covered with […]
Swedish researchers studying how music affects the human body have found that when people sing in a choir their heartbeats become synchronized and their pulses increase and decrease in unison. Until now, choral singing’s effects on health have not been the subject of detailed investigation. The researchers, from the University of Gothenburg, believe their research […]
Our love of music and appreciation of musical harmony is learnt and not based on natural ability, say researchers at the University of Melbourne (Australia). Their study, appearing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, directly challenges long-held theories about how humans appreciate music. Study author Neil McLachlan said that traditional analyses of musical harmony […]
The annoying guy at parties who keeps changing the music may be facing redundancy, thanks to a new robot DJ docking station that chooses music, reacts to crowd feedback and dances appallingly. Developed by Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology, Shimi the robot is being demonstrated today at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco and […]
An Emory University experiment originally designed to see how peer pressure affects teenagers has also been found to accurately predict the success or failure of pop songs. “We have scientifically demonstrated that you can, to some extent, use neuroimaging in a group of people to predict cultural popularity,” boasted Emory’s Gregory Berns. His findings appear […]
Using fMRI neuroimaging, Florida Atlantic University scientists have identified key aspects of musical performance that cause emotion-related brain activity, and they have shown, for the first time, how these performance nuances work in the brain, in real-time. The researchers behind the study, published inPLoS One, say their work pinpoints how musical performances charge up the […]
The musical scales that are most commonly used by composers are those that come closest to mimicking the physics of the human voice, say Duke University neurologists who claim that we understand emotions expressed through music because they mimic the way emotions are expressed in speech. In two new studies, the Duke researchers show that […]
Music is one of the surest ways to influence human emotion, but non-human primates scarcely respond to our music, and instead prefer silence. But researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that monkeys will respond to “monkey music,” 30-second tunes composed using the sonic attributes of actual monkey calls. Writing in the journal Biology […]
When guitarists play along together it isn’t just their instruments that are in time – their brain waves are too, say researchers who have been analyzing electroencephalography (EEG) readouts from pairs of guitarists. Published in the journal BMC Neuroscience, the research has wider implications for how our brains interact when we do. The scientists involved […]
In research that may lead to new therapies for children with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, researchers from Northwestern University have found the first biological evidence that musical training enhances an individual’s ability to recognize emotion in speech. Reporting the findings in the European Journal of Neuroscience, the study’s lead author Dana Strait explained that the […]
