Wild Music in the News

The Nigel Owens interview...A remarkable journey from the brink of suicide to becoming 'the best referee in the world' The Welsh referee talks about an eventful career that sees him take charge of his 50th Test this weekend when Ireland take on Italy in Dublin US singer-songwriter and the UK electro stars among the first wave of announcements for ... (more)

Some people just don't enjoy music, even though they can experience pleasure in other ways.

Music streaming service Spotify announced Thursday it had acquired The Echo Nest, a company behind technology to suggest songs to listeners.

On March 6th, 2014, a meteor slammed into the Earth's atmosphere and burned up over the night skies of north central New Mexico. Thomas Ashcraft captured the sights with a his fireball camera and the sounds with a forward-scatter meteor radar.

Scientists have created a robotic drumming prosthesis with motors that power two drumsticks. The first stick is controlled both physically by the musicians’ arms and electronically using electromyography (EMG) muscle sensors. The other stick “listens” to the music being played and improvises.

When listening to music or learning a new language, auditory perceptual learning occurs: a process in which your recognition of specific sounds improves, making you more efficient in processing and interpreting them. A neuroscientist now shows that auditory perceptual learning can be facilitated using neurofeedback, helping to focus on the sound differences that really matter.

A paper published in Bioacoustics explains how researchers have been able to estimate the age of an elephant based on its vocal sounds. Results showed that they could distinguish infants, calves, juveniles, and adults with 70% accuracy and youngsters (infants/calves) from adults with 95% accuracy. The call feature that was most useful for doing this was overall frequency—not surprisingly, since vocal frequency usually decreases as an animal grows larger.

The private spaceflight company will be ready to compete for Air Force contracts using its new Falcon rocket soon, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX said today (March 5) during a U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing.

Professor Gil Weinberg has already built a band of robotic musicians in his Georgia Tech lab. Now he's created a robot that can be attached to amputees, allowing its technology to be embedded into humans. The robotic drumming prosthesis has motors that power two drumsticks. The first stick is controlled both physically by the musicians' arms and electronically using electromyography (EMG) muscle sensors. The other stick "listens" to the music being played and improvises.  

(Phys.org) —The San Francisco-based hardware startup Aether Things has started offering a reservations list for its debut product, a music player that will apply machine learning to figure out what you want to hear. The speaker works with Apple iOS and Mac products. Aether said you need a device running iOS 7+ or Mac OSX 10.9+ Mavericks. The machine, called Cone, will learn musical choices as it goes. The Cone will sell for $399 and is targeted to make its appearance in Spring/Summer of this year, according to Aether Things' news release on Tuesday. Aether, whose co-founder is Danish entrepreneur (Skype, Rdio, Joost) Janus Friis, prides itself as a company that makes "thinking things." According to the Aether website, "Play music at the touch of a button. Change genres and moods with the turn of the dial. Or talk to Cone and tell it what song, genre or artist you want to hear."

(Cell Press) People born unable to see are readily capable of learning to perceive the shape of the human body through soundscapes that translate images into sound, according to researchers who report their findings in the Cell Press journal Current Biology. With a little training, soundscapes representing the outlines and silhouettes of bodies cause the brain's visual cortex -- and specifically an area dedicated in normally sighted people to processing body shapes -- to light up with activity.

Radio waves are used for many measurements and applications, for example, in communication with mobile phones, MRI scans, scientific experiments and cosmic observations. But 'noise' in the detector of the measuring instrument limits how sensitive and precise the measurements can be. Now researchers have developed a new method where they can avoid noise by means of laser light and can therefore achieve extreme precision of measurements.

Radio waves are used for many measurements and applications, for example, in communication with mobile phones, MRI scans, scientific experiments and cosmic observations. But 'noise' in the detector of the measuring instrument limits how sensitive and precise the measurements can be. Now researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have developed a new method where they can avoid noise by means of laser light and can therefore achieve extreme precision of measurements. The results are published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature.

Since Darwin's observations we thought that bird songs were a male trait for courting with females who were drawn to the most seductive male song.

In 71 percent of all songbird species with available data, the female sings, too. This is remarkable because in the wake of Darwin’s theory of evolution, birdsong has generally been seen as a characteristic of male birds, allowing them to compete with other males and attract females. The exciting question now is how females apparently repeatedly lost their song in the course of evolution. Why did they stop singing in some lineages, but not in others?

(University of Maryland Baltimore County) Scientists have long considered bird song to be an exclusively male trait, resulting from sexual selection. Now an international team of researchers says that's not the whole story. In Nature Communications, they write that 71 percent of songbirds in their extensive global survey had female song, and trait mapping revealed a common ancestor of modern songbirds also had female song. This research opens the door to explore alternative processes in the evolution of bird song.

Is there anything more fun than sexism in marketing? (See: Bic Pens for Her. And yes, everything short of toenail removal is more fun.) Its latest coup: tarnishing the enthusiasm we might have otherwise felt for Sustain Condoms. Created by the founder of Seventh Generation and his daughter (um, AWKWARD), the condoms are made from non-toxic, fair-trade rubber from an Indian plantation that pays workers a fair wage.

Sustain thinks fair-trade condoms will primarily appeal to us ladies with our squishy bunny hearts, rather than men, who hate sustainability and only buy brands that sound like monster trucks. (Trojan Magnum Destructo! OK, maybe Destructo would be a poor choice for a condom brand.) Explains Jeffrey Hollender:

Part of the challenge we are facing is the huge discomfort women feel buying condoms. If a man buys them, he’s having sex and he’s cool. Women have a negative attitude.

Right. Because a woman buying condoms is NOT having sex. She’s purchasing them to stitch into a wedding gown while crying softly and watching Say Yes to the Dress with her cat and a bottle of merlot. Yes, women get slut-shamed more than men, but we’re pretty sure almost EVERYbody feels self-conscious about buying condoms, not just women.

So yes, fair-trade condoms are cool. Less cool is assuming dudes don’t care how their sausage wrappers get made. If Sustain really wants to appeal to women, maybe they should brand vasectomies.

Filed under: Living

Could a new finding in bats help unlock a mystery about the human brain? Likely so, say researchers who have shown that a small region within the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the brains of all mammals, is responsible for producing emotional calls and sounds. They say this discovery might be key to locating a similar center in human brains.

An elevator to the moon might not be as crazy as it sounds, according to one company. A moon-based elevator to space could radically reduce the costs and improve the reliability of placing equipment on the lunar surface.

Aalto University researchers have found that music is perceived to have greater dynamic range in rectangular, shoebox shaped concert halls than in other types of halls.