A philosopher once wrote a book in which he asked the question, “What is music?” He described a group of acolytes who had stayed up all night debating and biting their nails over that koan. We know that we’re related to primates but as far as scientists can tell, monkeys have no interest in music. They prefer silence.
read more
Things got pretty nasty during the 2008 Presidential campaign, but researchers have discovered a way for everybody to “be nice” during future campaigns and political rallies. It has to do with the music: they shouldn’t sing patriotic songs, they should sing children’s songs instead.
read more
By age 9 months, babies can pick out sad music from happy pieces. Maybe we ALL start out with musicians’ brains: It turns out that trained musicians really DO think differently than the rest of us?in fact?along with successful baseball players?they use their brains the same way that left-handers do.
Psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians use a creative technique called divergent thinking, which utilizes both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person. This is the same way that the brains of people who are left-handed function.
read more
It’s really math – Philosophers have been biting their nails over this question for hundreds of years. Musicians and mathematicians don’t seem to have much in common, but scholars have suspected for centuries that the mysterious force that shapes the melodies that catch the ear is nothing other than math?geometry, to be precise. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras described pleasing musical intervals with simple mathematical ratios more than 2,600 years ago and this science evolved further during the Middle Ages when deep thinkers used those same ratios to model the “music of the spheres”?what many at that time believed to be the harmonious movements of the sun, moon and planets.read more