Science News

A new study review published by the University of Kentucky found that music therapy can be beneficial to patients before, during and after a surgical procedure and may reduce pain and recovery time.

Have you ever wondered what your brain sounds like when it is thinking? Download the sound files with brain music

Reubens tube: organ pipe resonance creates a pressure distribution that controls the flow of propane out of a tube. By Bailey Leppek, Daniela Molina Piper, Scott Schollenberger, Shane Schabow, Paul Mountford.

Playing music in a group setting on a regular basis significantly improves children's ability to empathize with others and show compassion, according to new findings.

This video shows the white matter connections and grey matter activity of a real human brain measured on a 3 Tesla MR scanner, visualized in a special way: it unites in one three-dimensional view the functional and structural connectedness of the brain, and makes the brain activity of this individual subject audible by converting it into the background music to the video. By visualizing in this way both a diffusion tensor and resting-state functional MR dataset acquired using a 3 Tesla MRI scanner, this movie illustrates different concepts of image processing, connectivity and activity in a real human brain at rest. The background music was composed by assigning a musical instrument to the ten strongest functional patterns in the brain.

Not to be outdone by "runner's high", music has been found to increase endorphins and increase a body's threshold for pain.

Two researchers have provide preliminary evidence that listening to Mozart can help us cope with cognitive dissonance—that intense feeling of discomfort that arises when we realize two of our core beliefs are at odds.

Neil Harbisson can only see shades of grey. So his prosthetic eyepiece, which he calls an “eyeborg”, interprets the colours for him and translates them into sound. Harbisson’s art sounds like a kind of inverse synaesthesia. But where synaesthetes experience numbers or letters as colours or even “taste” words, for example, Harbisson’s art is down to a precise transposition of colour into sound frequencies. As a result, he is able to create facial portraits purely out of sound, and he can tell you that the colour of Mozart’s music is mostly yellow. Liz Else caught up with him at the TEDGlobal conference.

From Mozart to the Beatles, music evolves as listeners get used to sounds they initially find strange or even shocking. As trailblazing music becomes mainstream, artists strike out in new directions. But in a new study, a computer program shows how listeners drive music to evolve in a certain way. Although the resulting strains are hardly Don Giovanni, the finding shows how users' tastes exert their own kind of natural selection, nudging tunes to evolve out of noise.

One of the great mysteries of art is why it exists. Although our desire to create and enjoy art is so widespread that it appears as natural as eating or reproducing -– nearly every culture draws, dances, sings, recites poetry and tells stories -– the origins of human aesthetics are not clear-cut. What’s peculiar is that from a biological point of view art appears to serve no adaptive advantages whatsoever.

On May 30, 2012 the 5th annual World Science Festival opened with a showing of Icarus at the Edge of Time. Written by Brian Greene, adapted by David Henry Hwang, film by Al and Al, score composed by Philip Glass, conducted by Brad Lubman, and narrated by LeVar Burton.