Birds are more like people than we may suspect, and their songs prove it. Studies have revealed common musical patterns that stretch across different human cultures. These common traits may come from constraints to the way people sing, and researchers have determined this from studying song birds.
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Some deaths are suspicious. Now scientists think that a couple of famous musicians from the past may have died from vitamin deficiencies!
The most famous of these is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who lived from 1756 to 1791, and suffered from many infectious illnesses including coughs, fever, sore throats, and other bad cold symptoms from 1762 to 1791, the year of his tragically earth death at 35 years old. Most of these illnesses occurred between mid-October and May. At the latitude of Salzburg and Vienna, where he lived, it is impossible to make your own vitamin D from exposure to sunlight for only about six months of the year.
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Give him or her music lessons! Those childhood music lessons keep our minds sharper as people age, even if we no longer play the instrument. A study recruited 70 healthy adults age 60 to 83 who were divided into groups based on their levels of musical experience. The musicians performed better on several cognitive tests than individuals who had never studied an instrument or learned how to read music. Psychologist Brenda Hanna-Pladdy says, "Musical activity throughout life may serve as a challenging cognitive exercise, making your brain fitter and more capable of accommodating the challenges of aging.read more
You can teach your computer poetry and slang, but you haven’t finished its education until you’ve taught it how to listen to music. Artificial intelligence researchers have teamed up with musicians on an unlikely project: a digital conductor of improvised avant-garde performances. But WHY? Researcher Selmer Bringsjord says, "A conductor that could guide such performances must be capable of “high-level reasoning. “Is there a way to render in formal logic and reasoning what Leonard Bernstein does? We will need to capture what the musicians are doing in a musical calculus.read more