Does the choice of music which a busker plays affect how much money is donated? Perhaps not as so much as you might think. Over the course of 24 days in 2019, a field experiment was carried out by a research team from Goldsmiths [1] University of London. It featured a professional busker [2] performing […]
Tag: Music
Comparing piano keys sounds with earthquakes [study]
Can the recorded sound of a single note played on a piano be compared to the seismic records of an earthquake? If so, how much (so)? A 2020 research project from the Golestan Institute of Higher Education, and the Department of Civil Engineering, Islamic Azad University of Kish Iran, has investigated. “The comparison between near-field […]
Respecting the prize-winning dignity of plants, in Barcelona
Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu opera house perhaps demonstrated, better than has ever been demonstrated, a principle that is part of the legal system in Switzerland: the principle that plants have dignity. We strongly urge you to watch the performance. CNN reports: Barcelona opera house reopens with performance to 2,292 plants It’s not uncommon for […]
Connections: Persian Rugs and Morton Feldman’s music [study]
Does listening to Morton Feldman’s ‘Crippled Symmetry’ suite (above) remind you of a Persian rug? If not, you may not be attuned to Feldman’s repetitions and variations – which, on closer inspection, may, it’s said, in some senses, resonate with patterns on rugs. But, academically speaking, possible common threads have not been studied in […]
12-Tone Music, explained without needless worship
Vi Hart, adept at mathematics, music, and explaining things, made this video that explains the point (and the lack of point, too) of 12-tone music:
The ‘Stroop Effect’ as Applied to Trombonists [new study]
A new variant of the psychologists’ stock-in-trade ‘Stroop test’ has been discovered – applicable only to trombonists. Background: The ‘Stroop Effect’ (a cognitive interference where a delay in the reaction time of a task occurs due to a mismatch in stimuli) is named after John Ridley Stroop who wrote the first academic paper (in English*) about […]
Science fallacies in the Jingle Jangle Jungle
(The Archies : 1968) If you type the phrase “Jingle Jangle” into your favourite internet search engine, there’s a good chance that the first result will be a link to the video above. Or maybe this book from Axel Scheffler. Less likely in the top-ranking results is a mention of a pair of scientific time-wasters […]
Music as a Hand-Washing Educational Tool, Now and Then
Danial Kheirikhah, a cleanly actor, shows, in this video how to wash one’s hands with the aid of a recording of a symphony orchestra: An Earlier Experiment with Kids A related—but not identical—technique has previously been shown to have some degree of merit for children. For details about that, see the study “The Effects of […]
Facial Pain and the Instruments of Finnish Orchestra Musicians
Aki Savolainen writes: “I found this one article my father was working on a year ago, which found out that musicians with sleep bruxism experience pain related to the severity of their symptoms (surprise), and the instrument they happen to be playing has no effect on the amount of pain experienced.” The study is: “Oro-facial […]
Sopranos (but not tenors) live longer [study]
Which (opera) singers tend to live longer – sopranos, contraltos, tenors or basses? This question was formally investigated in 2011 by researchers Abel EL, Kruger MM and Pandya K. of the Departments of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, US. Pertinent answers may be found in : Sopranos but not tenors live […]