Stringing together meaningless sounds to create meaningful signals was previously thought to be the preserve of humans alone, but a new study published in the journalPLOS Biology reveals that Australian babbler birds are also able to communicate in this way. Researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Zurich discovered that the chestnut-crowned babbler (pictured) – […]
Chimpanzees like to listen to the different rhythms of music from Africa and India, but prefer silence to music from the West, according to new research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. “We used cultural music from Africa, India and Japan to pinpoint specific acoustic properties,” said study co-author Frans de Waal, of Emory University. […]
Frenetic activity between the emotional and auditory parts of the brain explains why the sound of a knife on a bottle is so unpleasant, say University of Newcastle (UK) researchers who have been examining fMRI brain scans of subjects listening to different sounds. Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, reveals the interaction between […]
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has detected a cacophony of ultra-deep sound resonating through galaxy M87 thanks to a black hole that emits sounds around 56 octaves below middle C. M87, a giant elliptical galaxy, is centrally located in the Virgo cluster of galaxies and is known to harbor one of the universe’s most massive black […]
