music
Your Brain Is Like Beethoven
We survive noise by transforming it into patterns, like composers create music.
What Makes Music Universal
Music brings us together to show us how different we are.
We’re More of Ourselves When We’re in Tune with Others
Music reminds us why going solo goes against our better nature.
What Makes Music Special to Us?
Clarifying the differences between what animals and humans hear.
Why A.I. Is Just Not Funny
Although A.I. robots can pick up on jokes, they have a lot to learn about telling them.Queen Mary University of London / YouTube In the 2004 film I, Robot, Detective Del Spooner asks an A.I. named Sonny: “Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?” Sonny responds: […]
How Noise Makes Music
We use music to make sense of the squawks, creaks, and roars around us.
Is Multilingual Rap Eroding Canada’s French Language?
Recently a Quebec arts foundation required the Francophone rap group Dead Obies to give back an $18,000 grant they’d been awarded to record their newest album. The problem? A word count determined that the group had stirred too much English into their distinctive multilingual lyrics, falling short of the rule that 70 percent of the […]
When You Listen to Music, You’re Never Alone
Technology hasn’t diminished the social quality of listening to music.
The Cello Music of the Spheres
Experience mathematical beauty and symmetry in a multimedia work.
Some Music Is Inherently Bad—But People Can Be Convinced Otherwise
Artistic appreciation is a deeply subjective process, perhaps the most essentially personal thing that humans do. But are there some explanations for why we like what we do? Why, for instance, does a particular song get popular? Some of it has to do with the quality of the music—and by quality, I mean that there’s […]
