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 […]

Science/Music Pairing: Dark Eyes

Here’s another in our series that combines published research papers with musical performances that suitably accompany them. “Dark eyes in female sand gobies indicate readiness to spawn,” Karin H. Olsson, Sandra Johansson, Eva-Lotta Blom, Kai Lindström, Ola Svensson, Helen Nilsson Sköld, and Charlotta Kvarnemo, PloS ONE , vol.12, no. 6 (2017): e0177714. “Dark Eyes,” performed […]

Hedgehogs at a Music Festival

While others study pictures at an exhibition, Wanja Rast, Leon M.F. Barthel, and Anne Berger study hedgehogs at a music festival. They wrote this report about it: “Music festival makes hedgehogs move: How individuals cope behaviorally in response to human-induced stressors,” Wanja Rast, Leon M.F. Barthel, and Anne Berger, Animals, IX/7 [2019] pp. 2–19. (Thanks […]

The mystery of the whirly tube’s missing fundamental mode [study]

The musical instrument shown above is known by various names e.g. the whirly tube, the corrugaphone, the bloogle resonator, the voice of the dragon, the hummer, and even, according to American composer (and parodist) Peter Schickele the “Lasso d’Amore”. For acousticians, it’s noteworthy because the fundamental acoustic mode, that’s to say the note that one […]

The F note, a harmonious accompaniment to the F word

The Bibliolore blog tells some history about the supposed significance of the musical note F: The F note, one could say, has a musing-and-fraudulent aura that makes it a good musical accompaniment to the F word. In The voice of the silence (1889), Helena Blavatsky (above) designated the pitch F as the keynote of nature. Blavatsky’s authority was Benjamin Silliman, a Professor […]

Dickey’s gander at a quibble about pitch: 432 Hz for orchestras?

Colin Dicky takes a gander at a cocked quibble, in the essay “Pitch Battles—HOW A PARANOID FRINGE GROUP MADE MUSICAL TUNING AN INTERNATIONAL ISSUE“: “In 1988, more than a dozen of opera’s greatest superstars—including Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, and Birgit Nilsson [pictured here]—added their names to a petition before the Italian government, asking it to […]