If you’re interested in the music of Whirly Tubes, and the physics behind it, the late Dr. Paul Doherty’s website may be just the thing for you. There you will find (amongst many other things) sections on : What Notes Do Whirlies Sing? What makes a whirly sing? Math Root the connection between the frequency of the […]
Tag: Music
Musical instruments – masculine or feminine? [study]
If you’re wondering whether musical instruments can be graded according to whether they’re perceived as masculine or feminine, the answer is yes (such perceptions can be graded). For an example study, look no further than the Journal of Research in Music Education, Volume: 29 issue: 1, page(s): 57-62, Issue published: April 1, 1981, where you’ll […]
Musical Coordination in a Large Group Without Plans or Leaders
An experiment looked at whether harmony, in its many meanings, might emerge from a tossing together of musicians. This study tells what happened: “Musical Coordination in a Large Group Without Plans Nor Leaders,” Louise Goupil, Pierre Saint-Germier, Gaëlle Rouvier, Diemo Schwarz, and Clément Canonne, Scientific Reports, vol. 10, no. 20377, 2020. (Thanks to Tony Tweedale […]
Playing pop hits not linked to increased profit for London buskers [study]
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 […]
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 […]