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Two St V concerts, on November 16 and 19 in Charleroi and Brussels, will mark an unprecedented experiment: the Orchestre symphonique de l'Université libre de Bruxelles is taking part in a research project with Cambridge University. Researchers will test a new form of musical writing for the first time, on the scale of a full orchestra, in order to evaluate its impact on performance and audience perception .

The seismic activity generated by Taylor Swift's sold-out concerts in Dublin in July 2024 provided a unique opportunity for scientific engagement and education, according to the authors of a groundbreaking new study. Geophysicist Eleanor Dunn from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies hit the headlines in July 2024 with her #SwiftQuakeDublin project studying the seismic activity generated by Taylor Swift's concerts in Dublin.

A new website offers video capsules and popular texts to inform the general public about the scientifically recognized benefits of playing and listening to music You don't have to be a violin virtuoso or a guitarist of the calibre of Jimi Hendrix to enjoy the benefits of music. Every amateur musician benefits from playing an instrument, even if it's just a few notes or a wooden spoon.

An international study co-authored by McGill psychologist Caroline Palmer suggests our brains and bodies don't just understand music, they physically resonate with it. These discoveries, based on findings in neuroscience, music, and psychology, support Neural Resonance Theory (NRT). NRT maintains that rather than relying on learned expectations or prediction, musical experiences arise from the brain's natural oscillations that sync with rhythm, melody and harmony.

A study carried out at UdeM by Craig Turner and his doctoral supervisor Felipe Verdugo shows how pianists' "expressive intentions" may heighten their risk of long-term injury. Playing the piano involves much more than striking the keyboard. The pianist's entire body is in movement, from the torso to the fingers.

Eminem, Jay-Z, LL Cool J, or Nas-it is often the star rappers who claim sovereignty over the sound of a track through their voice and lyrics. The subject literature reveals contradictory views about who really determines the sound of a music production. In a study published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, a team of musicologists led by Tim Ziemer from the University of Hamburg has now been able to prove that it is clearly the producers.

We each have a natural rhythm, and music that matches it offers the best pain relief, McGill research suggests Music has the best chance of providing pain relief when it is played at our natural rhythm, a McGill University research team has discovered. This suggests it may be possible to reduce a patient's level of pain by using technology to take a piece of music someone likes and adjust the tempo to match their internal rhythm, the researchers said.

How pieces of music by different composers and genres develop can be anticipated for different periods of time Compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach are less predictable than those by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. And how a jazz piece develops can be anticipated even less. This is what two physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen discovered when they used over 550 pieces of classical music and jazz to investigate the extent to which a piece of music raises expectations about its future course.

New findings about the sound production mechanism of ultra-high-pitched operatic singing Opera singers have to use the extreme limits of their voice range. Many pedagogical and scientific sources suggest that the highest pitches reached in classical singing can only be produced with a so-called "whistle" voice register, in analogy to ultrasonic vocalizations of mice and rats.

Speech and music are the dominant elements of an infant's auditory environment. While past research has shown that speech plays a critical role in children's language development, less is known about the music that infants hear. A new University of Washington study, published May 21 in Developmental Science , is the first to compare the amount of music and speech that children hear in infancy.

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour might be the latest chapter in pop history, but looking back into our musical past could also hold important clues about our culture and who we are as humans, according to a new study from The Australian National University (ANU). Utilising The  Global Jukebox - an online database of more than 5,000 songs - the study shows the unique capability of music to reveal new information about our cultural past and how songs sing to us over multiple generations.

Why does some music make us want to dance more than others? This is the question that a research team from Inserm and Aix-Marseille Université tried to answer by studying the desire to dance (also called the 'groove') and the brain activity of 30 participants who were asked to listen to music. Their findings show that the groove sensation is highest for a moderately complex rhythm and that the desire to move is reflected in the brain by an anticipation of the music's rhythm.

The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures. There are many more kinds of harmony out there Peter Harrison According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, 'consonance' - a pleasant-sounding combination of notes - is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4.

Feeling stressed? "Take Me Home, Country Roads", "Nothing Else Matters" or "Baby One More Time" might calm you down again. Psychologist and music scientist Krisna Adiasto discovered that music genre doesn't seem to play a role in the songs we choose to recover from stress, but the songs that work do have shared characteristics.

Singing, at any age, can improve accuracy and speed of elocution during complex tasks . Talking is an exercise that requires great coordination between the lungs and the muscles that control the vocal cords, jaw, tongue and lips. As the years go by, these anatomical structures undergo changes that affect vocal function.

Music hits that are made available for free by users on YouTube are less in demand on platforms such as Spotify or Apple Music. For the broad mass of lesser-known artists, on the other hand, uploading to YouTube by users can help them gain more attention and thus revenue via more lucrative platforms.

New research published in a high impact journal shows that there could be "one Ring to rule them all" orchestrating brain dynamics, in some ways similar to Tolkien's famous poem in The Lord of the Rings. The study has identified a ring of regions of the prefrontal cortex which sits at the top of the hierarchical system governing brain dynamics.

When Burnaby eighth grader Advaith S. Iyer decided to participate in the Greater Vancouver Regional Science Fair (GVRSF) for the first time this spring an ambitious research idea emerged. Seeking to test the cognitive load - the amount of work the brain is doing - associated with playing musical instruments, his high school laboratory equipment was insufficient for his complex experiment.

An organism's body plan arises through a process called gastrulation, during which the embryo forms three distinct layers of cells that will later give rise to all organs. Now, FMI researchers have mapped the development of three-dimensional clusters of cells that mimic aspects of gastrulation, providing important insights into the molecular mechanisms that regulate early embryonic development and cell fate determination.