Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

The Gibbon of the Opera

August 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Gibbon

What does a soprano have in common with an ape? Sure, it sounds like one of a long line of soprano jokes (presumably with the word “Wagner” in the punch line). But it’s a serious question, with a surprising answer: Their vocal techniques are virtually identical. New research from Japan reveals the same technique it took Renee Fleming years to master comes quite naturally to a gibbon. An ability we thought of as uniquely human is, in fact, something we share with at least one other species. “Our speech was thought to have evolved through specific modifications in our vocal ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Findings
Tags: ,

Memory Gone, the Melodies Linger On

August 17, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Can’t get that tune out of your head, even though you have no recollection of its name? Scientists are gradually coming to understanding why. It’s starting to look like our memory for music is the result of unique brain circuitry, quite separate from the mechanisms that allow us to remember our first grade teacher or last night’s dinner. Evidence for this can be found in a newly published case study from Germany, which looks at a 68-year-old professional cellist who developed amnesia following a bout of encephalitis.  “Despite severe memory impairments,” a research team of ... Read More

More like this: The 101
Tags: ,

Sex Shapes How We Hear Music

August 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Sex and Music

Once a year, it seems, the worlds of gender studies, fashion and classical music collide at the Hollywood Bowl. The object of everyone’s attention is Chinese pianist Yuja Wang, who dresses stylishly—some would say provocatively—when performing as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the historic outdoor venue. Last year, she turned heads in a small orange dress; last night, the Los Angeles Times reports, she wowed in purple. This sort of sex appeal no doubt sells tickets, but does it impact the way people actually hear her music? A couple of studies we’ve reported on ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, The 101
Tags: ,

Start Highstepping When Politicians are Sidestepping

August 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Marc Herman’s 101 post about flash mobs flamenco-ing in Spain’s ailing banks sounds like an echo, or perhaps an ancestor, of this summer’s edition of the “Step Up” film oeuvre, “Step Up Revolution.” In Spain, the group Flo6x8 draws attention the corruption that’s gnawing at the foundations of the nation’s financial system; in SUR, a chirpy troupe known as The Mob battles an evil tycoon (are there any other kind?) who wants to raze a Miami neighborhood and replace it with something that’s presumably more profitable. While the premise of “Step Up” first struck me ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The 101
Tags: ,

Hate Rock 101

August 7, 2012 • By • 1 Comment
Wade Michael Page

The recent shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin has brought sudden attention to one of the most underground music scenes in America: hate rock. Wade M. Page, the man who killed six people and wounded three others in a shooting rampage on Sunday, was the front man of a white supremacist band called End Apathy and belonged to another called Definite Hate. In a 2010 interview posted to his record label’s web site, Page—who killed himself at the scene in Wisconsin—said he became involved with the white power music scene beginning in the early 2000s, and that he had occasionally ... Read More

More like this: Culture
Tags: ,

Even Patients with Severe Dementia Respond to Music

July 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Music has charms to soothe even those suffering from severe Alzheimer’s disease. That’s the key finding of encouraging new research from France, which found music therapy enhanced the moods of patients as much as four weeks after the conclusion of a four-week-long program. It’s the latest in a series of studies that point to music therapy as an effective tool in dealing with dementia. The Italian Psychogeriatric Association just reviewed 32 papers published over the past decade, and found a pattern of significant reductions in such symptoms as depression, delusions, and ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Findings, Health
Tags: , ,

Should We Let Violinists’ Bad Behavior Slide?

June 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Imagine, for a moment, you’re a judge at a music competition. You learn that a highly promising violinist has been sabotaging her competitors’ performances. Do you punish her for this behavior? Surprising new research from Switzerland suggests the answer may depend upon your line of work. “People turn out to be choosy with respect to the (ethical) norms they are willing to enforce in particular circumstances,” writes a research team led by Christine Clavien of the University of Lausanne’s Department of Ecology and Evolution. Its study, published in the online journal PLoS ... Read More

More like this: Culture & Society, Findings
Tags: ,

Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive—Seriously

June 21, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Properly performed CPR can double the chance of survival after sudden cardiac arrest. But even health-care professionals often have trouble complying with the American Heart Association’s CPR guidelines of at least 100 compressions per minute. To address this problem, Dr. John Hafner of the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria had 15 physicians and med students perform the 100-compression procedure (on mannequins) while listening to the Bee Gees classic “Stayin’ Alive.” As Hafner reports in the Journal of Emergency Medicine, their mean compression rate was an ... Read More

More like this: Findings, Health
Tags: ,

Write a String Quartet? There’s a Program for That

June 14, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

A few years from now, as you take your seat in a concert hall, you might open your program and find a puzzling announcement: Tonight we’ll be hearing works by André Previn, Henry Purcell, and Hewlett Packard. An annoying example of product placement? Actually, it could be an accurate, if incomplete, indicator of authorship. And without that notification, we might never know the difference. Most of us like to think we could easily differentiate between a piece of music written by a human being and one generated by a computer. But a paper just presented at the International ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings
Tags: , ,

Listening to Music Aids in Stroke Recovery

June 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Recovering from a stroke is an arduous, frustrating process. But newly published research suggests at least some struggling patients can enhance their progress through a simple and pleasurable activity: listening to music. Frequent exposure to favorite melodies is a painless and “inexpensive way to help stroke patients cope with the adverse emotional and psychological impacts of stroke, as well as to support their cognitive recovery, especially in the early post-stroke stage,” write the University of Helsinki’s Teppo Särkämö and David Soto of Imperial College London. Their ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Findings, Health
Tags: , ,