Wild Music in the News

The literary great Marcel Proust wore ear-stoppers because he was unable to filter out irrelevant noise -- and lined his bedroom with cork to attenuate sound. Now new research suggests why the inability to shut out competing sensory information while focusing on the creative project at hand might have been so acute for geniuses such as Proust, Franz Kafka, Charles Darwin, Anton Chekhov and many others.

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Every summer, tens of thousands of people across Australia revel in live outdoor music, staying for a day or pitching their tents for a weekend. When the music dies, however, what's left may be less appealing – a churned-up landscape with tonnes of food and drink packaging, a sea of discarded possessions and overflowing portable toilets.

Hearing updates about peers, whether positive or negative, can be beneficial

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

(NIH/National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) Lights, sound, action: we are constantly learning how to incorporate outside sensations into our reactions in specific situations. In a new study, brain scientists have mapped changes in communication between nerve cells as rats learned to make specific decisions in response to particular sounds. The team then used this map to accurately predict the rats' reactions. These results add to our understanding of how the brain processes sensations and forms memories to inform behavior.

(Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience) Samuel Young, Jr., Ph.D., at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience has been awarded a $2.4 million, five-year grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to investigate how synaptic vesicle activity modulates the transfer of auditory information and ultimately how this impacts our ability to discern sounds.

Researchers describe how postmortem brain slices can be 'read' to determine how a rat was trained to behave in response to specific sounds, a new article suggests. The work provides one of the first examples of how specific changes in the activity of individual neurons encode particular acts of learning and memory in the brain.

Good progress is being made on construction of the world's fastest car - the Bloodhound supersonic vehicle, which aims to run at over 1,000mph.

(Phys.org)—Photonic quantum technologies – including cryptography, enhanced measurement and information processing – face a conundrum: They require single photons, but these are difficult to create, manipulate and measure. At the same time, quantum memories enable these technologies by acting as a photonic buffer. Therefore, an ideal part of the solution would be a single-photon on-demand read/write quantum memory. To date, however, development of a practical single-photon quantum memory has been stymied by (1) the need for high efficiency, (2) the read/write lasers used introducing noise that contaminates the quantum state, and (3) decoherence of the information stored in the memory.

Is it true spies hack technology companies? Can governments really listen to your phone calls? Should we care? The latest details of NSA and GCHQ intelligence agency activities to come from files leaked by Edward Snowden are of the apparently massive theft of mobile phone SIM card encryption keys from the Dutch firm Gemalto.

(Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) In work published today in Nature, researchers describe how postmortem brain slices can be 'read' to determine how a rat was trained to behave in response to specific sounds. The work provides one of the first examples of how specific changes in the activity of individual neurons encode particular acts of learning and memory in the brain.

Is there such a thing as cat-centric music, which is pleasing music to cats' ears?

Known for their beautiful singing duets, plain wrens of Costa Rica perform precise phrase-by-phrase modifications to the duration between two consecutive phrases, achieving careful coordination as their songs unfold. A new study shows that these songbirds achieve precise coordination by adjusting the period between two consecutive phrases (inter-phrase intervals), depending on whether their song is answered, the phrase type used in the duet and the position of the inter-phrase interval within the duet.

Known for their beautiful singing duets, plain wrens of Costa Rica perform precise phrase-by-phrase modifications to the duration between two consecutive phrases, achieving careful coordination as their songs unfold, according to a new study published in the Journal of Avian Biology.

Rejected by a person you like? Just "shake it off" and move on, as music star Taylor Swift says. But while that might work for many people, it may not be so easy for those with untreated depression, a new brain study finds. The pain of social rejection lasts longer for them -- and their brain cells release less of a natural pain and stress-reducing chemical called natural opioids.

Scientists at Plymouth University play improvised pieces of music with the help of slime mould.

(University of Miami) The new study shows that these songbirds achieve precise coordination by adjusting the period between two consecutive phrases (inter-phrase intervals), depending on whether their song is answered, the phrase type used in the duet and the position of the inter-phrase interval within the duet.

How do we mortals perceive random sequences? An entry in the question-and-answer site Quora focused on a question involving a music-streaming service Spotify. That question signifies how we perceive what is and what is not random.

Across the country music teachers believe that factors at the school level have the greatest impact on their programs. Matters beyond the school are not seen as having a significant influence on their programs, even though district, state and national educational policies have an effect on music education; according to a new study published in the Journal of Research in Music Education.

Fans of a bedroom sing-along can now look beyond karaoke systems as music streaming giant Spotify tries to attract their attention by integrating lyrics into its service.