Some people get the chills or feel moved to tears when listening to certain songs, while others tend to experience a less-intense reaction to music. Now, a new study hints that your level of music enjoyment may be partially written in your genes.

According to a study published March 25 in the journal Nature Communications, 54% of the differences in the levels of music enjoyment between individuals can be attributed to their genes. The scientists behind the work attribute the remaining percentage to environmental factors such as growing up in a family that played musical instruments or listened to music together, as well as other, past music-related experiences.

"This study explores something many of us in music have long suspected — some people are just wired to connect with music on a deeper level," Mitchell Hutchings, an associate professor of voice at Florida Atlantic University who was not involved with the work, told Live Science in an email.

Through statistical modelling, the study also found that different genetic factors influence different aspects of music enjoyment, such as how music affects a person's mood, the pleasure people get from moving to a beat, or the bonds people form through shared musical experiences.

Related: Google's 'mind-reading' AI can tell what music you listened to based on your brain signals

"The idea that different genetic pathways influence things like emotional connection to music, dancing, or playing with others also fits what we see in real life," Hutchings said. "For example, some singers are drawn to expression, some to rhythm, and others thrive in collaborative settings." So those involved in making music are also drawn to the art form for different reasons.

To explore the role of genetics in music enjoyment, Giacomo Bignardi, a doctoral candidate in cognitive neuroscience, and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands studied data from more than 9,000 twins ages 37 to 64. The data was pulled from the Swedish Twin Registry, a large-scale medical research resource. In all, the study included around 3,400 identical twins and 5,600 nonidentical twins.

Identical twins share nearly 100% of their DNA, while nonidentical twins share about 50%. Therefore, comparing aspects of musical enjoyment in different twin pairs enabled the researchers to estimate the influence of genetics. If the identical twins experienced more similar levels of music enjoyment than fraternal twins did, genetics must play a role in that experience, the researchers surmised, and they wanted to estimate the extent of that genetic influence.

To measure people's level of music enjoyment, the researchers used the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, which asks participants to rate how strongly they agree with 20 statements, on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Some statements included "Music calms and relaxes me," "When I hear a tune I like a lot, I can't help tapping or moving to its beat," and "When I share music with someone, I feel a special connection."

Identical twins showed more than twice the similarity in music enjoyment than nonidentical twins did, on average, suggesting that genetics does play a significant role in shaping how much pleasure people get from music.

However, one limitation of the study is that it relied on the assumption that twins have the same level of musical exposure, by virtue of being raised in the same household. As such, the researchers assumed, any differences in music enjoyment would be due to genetics, rather than attributed to environmental factors.

But the researchers acknowledged that this assumption does not always hold. For instance, one twin might seek out more musical experiences than the other — say, attending music classes or concerts — which would likely shape their musical enjoyment.

Another limitation lies in the study's homogeneous population. "Because the twin study was performed in Swedish twins, studies in different countries are needed to see if the same relative effects of genes and environment are observed in different cultures," Michelle Luciano, a professor in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, told Live Science in an email.

The researchers also tested the participants' abilities to distinguish between melodies, rhythms and pitches — musical skills that were previously linked to genetic factors. Separately, they also assessed participants' overall responsiveness to rewards and positive outcomes, a trait known as "reward sensitivity." This helped the team determine whether genetics was tied specifically to music enjoyment, rather than to the twins' musical perception skills or a broader tendency to enjoy rewarding stimuli.

The results showed that much of the genetic influence over music enjoyment — about 70% — was not related to musical skills or reward sensitivity.

This mirrors Hutchings' real-life observations. "I've seen students who aren't particularly driven by external rewards but come alive when they're performing or even just listening to music," he said.

Looking ahead, Luciano noted that "the findings should encourage research into the evolutionary origins of music enjoyment and the brain pathways that map onto the positive emotions that music can evoke."

A Japanese scientist has taken inspiration from the climate crisis to compose music that sounds as ominous as current forecasts of ecological breakdown.

Hiroto Nagai, a geoenvironmental scientist and associate professor at Rissho University in Tokyo, compiled publicly available climate data from the Arctic and Antarctic to produce a 6-minute chamber music composition for string quartet. Musicians performed the piece in February 2023, with footage of the recital released on YouTube two months later. Nagai then gathered feedback and described the work that went into the music in a study, which was published online April 18, 2024 in the journal iScience.

The aim of the experiment was to raise awareness of climate change through art. "One of the main insights from the participants is that music, unlike usual graphical representations of scientific data, evokes [an] emotional impression first," Nagai wrote in the study. "It grabs the audiences' attention forcefully, while graphical representations require active and conscious recognition instead."

The climate data used for the composition spans the last 30 years. Nagai extracted records of solar radiation, surface temperature, precipitation and cloud thickness from four weather stations in the Arctic and Antarctica to represent the "energy budget" of Earth's poles.

Related: Creepy 'biotwang' noises coming from the Mariana Trench finally explained after 10 years

The energy budget of a region is the balance between the amount of energy incoming from the sun and the amount of energy that is reflected back into space. Earth's energy budget depends on the albedo effect, which dictates that dark-colored surfaces, such as oceans and forests, reflect less energy back into space than light-colored surfaces. Given that polar regions are covered in snow and ice, they reflect almost all the solar radiation that reaches them.

But climate change is reducing the amount of ice at the poles, throwing Earth's energy budget off kilter. Rising temperatures are causing entire ice shelves to collapse and the extent of sea ice to shrink year-on-year. As ice melts, it exposes darker surfaces that absorb more solar radiation, leading to increased warming and triggering a climate feedback loop.

Nagai used software to convert the data into sheet music. He separated the various datasets into sections labeled A to I, with the shape of the music on the page roughly mirroring the curves of the data. He then made stylistic additions and changes to the music to avoid repetitive sequences.

The process of transforming data into sound is known as sonification. While researchers previously tried this method, the resulting soundscapes didn't sound like conventional music due to a lack of stylistic changes.

"There is a tendency to avoid intentional interventions or edits (i.e., contamination) in the original data," Nagai wrote in the study. "As a result, while the information from the original data are preserved as much as possible, composed musical pieces often contain a monotonous progression and lack any significant dynamics."

Nagai's composition, titled "Polar Energy Budget," includes both data-derived melodies and free arrangements. The choice of a string quartet (two violins, a viola and a cello) was based on the four-voice structure and diversity of playing techniques of these instruments.

"This marks a significant turning point from an era where only scientists handled data to an era where artists can freely use data to create their works," Nagai concluded in the study.

Many people know the feeling of being "in the zone": As they're fully immersed in a task, the background noise of the world fades and they may not notice time passing. Gymnasts may enter this all-consuming mental state as they're refining a floor routine, an artist might find "the zone" when adding delicate brushstrokes to a painting and a writer might enter it as they're crafting the climax of a chapter.

This state, known in psychology as a "flow state," is pursued by those who want to be more productive and creative in an enjoyable way. What happens in the brain during this state, however, has been under debate for more than four decades.

Now, in research published March 4 in the journal Neuropsychologia, scientists may have settled the debate. They conducted a new brain-scan study that has finally revealed which regions of the brain are activated in the midst of a creative flow state.

Their findings contradict one popular theory of flow while supporting another, and they seem to reveal the key ingredients needed to get "in the zone."

Related: What happens in our brains when we 'hear' our own thoughts?

The competing hypotheses of flow

Two brain networks have historically been studied during tasks that could unlock flow. One is the default mode network (DMN), a circuit of connected brain areas associated with daydreaming whose activity spikes when people are not engaged in a specific task. The second is the executive control network (ECN), which supports complex cognitive processes, like problem-solving, and tunes out distractions.

Both networks can act independently, but they've also been shown to display certain levels of connectivity and to interact dynamically, especially during the creative process.

Researchers have proposed two main theories for how the flow state affects the brain. The first posits it's a state of hyperfocus in which ECN activity increases and guides the DMN to maintain focus on a task, to help generate relevant ideas, said Dmitri van der Linden, a professor of work and organizational psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam who was not involved in the new study.

"It has been hypothesized that during flow, which is characterized by an intense task focus, DMN activity is relatively low," van der Linden told Live Science in an email. DMN activity is linked to "creative production," though, which is needed to generate ideas and improvise, he noted. With that in mind, this first hypothesis implies that both the ECN and the DMN are active and play off each other during flow, respectively contributing attention and creativity.

The alternative theory of flow, however, says that the expertise a person gains in a task through practice forges its own neural processing network that does not require ECN supervision or DMN involvement.

If you don't know, you can't flow

To pit these hypotheses against each other, John Kounios, a professor of psychology at Drexel University and senior author of the study, and his team studied 32 jazz guitarists, some highly experienced and some less-experienced. Creative tasks like improvisational jazz lend themselves well to triggering a flow state.

The researchers scanned the musicians' brains using electroencephalogram caps, fitted caps studded with electrodes that track the brain's electrical activity. They examined activity in areas related to the DMN and the ECN and compared flow and non-flow states, which they evaluated with a questionnaire about the musicians' experiences while improvising.

Experienced musicians in a flow state showed decreased activity in the ECN and the DMN and increased activity in regions that process auditory, visual and movement information. This suggests that, during flow, individuals "let go" or switch into "autopilot" and experience less conscious control.

Moreover, experienced musicians in a flow state didn't seem to rely on the DMN to generate ideas, since its activity was down. Instead, they used the networks they had formed throughout their lives while honing their craft — in other words, networks involved in hearing and playing guitar, the researchers concluded.

Meanwhile, less-experienced musicians showed little change in the baseline activity of their ECNs, DMNs, or other processing centers while improvising in either low- or high-flow states. This suggests that only through gaining expertise and "letting go" can a person hope to achieve a high state of flow.

According to van der Linden, these findings address key questions in neuroscience and are especially impactful because they looked at brain activity during a real-life creative task rather than one invented for a study.

"This can be the basis for new techniques for instructing people to produce creative ideas," Kuonios said in a statement. In future work, the group hopes to confirm their theory with other creative tasks, such as drawing, while replicating the findings with higher-resolution brain-scanning techniques.

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In his book "Musicophilia," renowned neuroscientist Oliver Sacks described the remarkable ability of Sir Frederick Ouseley, a former music professor at the University of Oxford, to recognize the pitch of everyday sounds. For example, he said it "thundered in G" and the "wind whistled in D." 

Ouseley had perfect pitch, also called absolute pitch — the remarkable, rare ability to identify or produce particular musical notes without having a reference note as a guide. 

"People who possess this ability [absolute pitch] can name notes as immediately and effortlessly as most people can name colors," Diana Deutsch, an adjunct professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University and a professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, told Live Science in an email. 

But why do some people have this extraordinary ability, while others don't?

Related: Do we really use only 10% of our brains? 

First, it's important to note that absolute pitch differs from "relative pitch," which describes someone's ability to differentiate between the pitch of two or more notes — an essential skill for musicians playing in an orchestra. But only 1 in 10,000 people have absolute pitch, and scientists don't yet know what leads to this ability. 

There are several theories, however. The first relates to genetics, as the skill can run in families. However, identifying a specific genetic cause has proved difficult. 

"Researchers have attempted to find a DNA marker for absolute pitch, but although there have been several suggestions, none have proved conclusive," Deutsch said. It is also difficult to tease apart the influence of genetics from a person's environment, for instance parents with absolute pitch may be more likely to spend time teaching their children. 

Another explanation is the "critical period" theory. Like our ability to learn a language, there may be a specific developmental stage when humans are more likely to cultivate absolute pitch based on their exposure to certain environmental influences. One study, for example, found that 40% of musicians who began training when they were 4 years old or younger had absolute pitch, compared with 3% who started training after they turned 9. 

Some of Deutsch's research in speakers of tonal languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese — who are more likely to have absolute pitch — has supported this critical-period theory. 

"In these languages, words take on entirely different meanings depending on the lexical tones in which they are spoken," Deutsch said. (Lexical tones are the pitches of words.) If you say the word "ma" in Mandarin in one tone, for instance, it means "mother," but in another tone, it can mean "horse," she said. 

Therefore, as children acquire language, they begin to associate the meaning of a word with the tone in which it is spoken. If they later decide to take music lessons, this same principle may be applied to the acquisition of musical tones. 

In one study, Deutsch and her team found that Mandarin-speaking students in Chinese music conservatories were much more likely to have absolute pitch than were English-speaking students in American music conservatories. Interestingly, though, in another study, they found that English-speaking students with absolute pitch were really good at remembering long lists of spoken numbers. 

"This could have fostered the development of associations between musical notes and their spoken names early in life," Deutsch said. It's therefore possible that having an "unusually strong" natural ability to remember the sound of speech could influence whether someone acquires absolute pitch, she said. 

Other scientists think that with enough training, anyone can acquire absolute pitch at any time, although attempts to prove this have been met with little success, Deutsch said. 

In 2015, psychology professor Howard Nusbaum and colleagues Stephen van Hedger and Shannon Heald, who at the time were working at the University of Chicago, showed that it was possible to train people to acquire absolute pitch. However, this ability depended on whether they had good auditory working memory. Remembering the sound of your mother's voice is one example of this type of memory, Nusbaum told Live Science. 

Keith Schneider, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Delaware, and colleagues discovered that professional musicians with absolute pitch have a much larger auditory cortex, the part of the brain that processes sound, than other musicians without absolute pitch or people who had no musical training. Their brains also responded to a wider range of frequencies of sound, compared with the brains of other people, he told Live Science. 

However, it is possible to lose absolute pitch, Nusbaum said. In one study, when he and his team slowly detuned music that they played to a group of people who had absolute pitch, they found that the participants lost their ability to detect the tuning of notes. Flat notes sounded in tune to them, while in-tune notes sounded sharp, he said. 

"That suggested that the note knowledge that people have is not chiseled in stone in your brain; it's just recorded there, but it's sensitive to context," Nusbaum said. In other words, the mental representation of notes can change with experience. 

With or without absolute pitch, though, as Sacks wrote in "Musicophilia," musical stardom may still await. 

"Absolute pitch is not necessarily of much importance even to musicians — Mozart had it, but Wagner and Schumann lacked it," Sacks wrote. 

_{(Audio credit: Bellier et al., 2023, PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/))}

By recording and decoding people's brain activity as they listened to Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall," scientists recreated recognizable snippets of the 1979 protest song. 

In some clips, you can make out a Roger Waters-like voice crooning the well-known chorus — but in others, the anthem sounds much muddier. Still, the researchers say that the work adds "another brick in the wall" of our understanding of how the brain processes music and could have future applications in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that help people communicate. 

Previous studies had reconstructed intelligible speech by decoding it from brain activity, and research has shown that music can be reconstructed using similar techniques. The functional overlap of the brain structures involved in processing these two types of complex acoustic signals makes this possible.

Related: Google's 'mind-reading' AI can tell what music you listened to based on your brain signals

_{(Audio credit: Bellier et al., 2023, PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/))}

In the new study, published Tuesday (Aug. 15) in the journal PLOS Biology, researchers  wanted to better understand how humans process music with the intention of developing BCIs. For people that can mentally form words but can't physically speak, like those with locked-in syndrome, such devices can help them communicate. 

BCIs incorporate models that translate brain activity into words, but lack models that capture musical elements, like pitch, melody, harmony and rhythm. Such models could help users better convey the emotion behind their words, senior author Robert Knight, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science. For example, they may be able to turn a robotic-sounding "I love you" into a declaration with a more human ring to it, he said.

The team analyzed the brain activity of 29 people who listened to Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1." Each participant had epilepsy and had undergone a procedure called intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), during which 2,668 electrodes were placed on their cortex, the wrinkly surface of the brain. 

Of those, 347 electrodes were most relevant for processing music. Rhythm perception was tied to a specific portion of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), part of the brain known to be key for auditory processing. Most of the other key electrodes were in the sensorimotor cortex, which processes and responds to sensory information, and inferior frontal gyrus, linked to language comprehension and production. 

The participants were asked to listen to the music without focusing on any details. The electrodes then picked up the electrical activity of their neurons, capturing how different musical elements were encoded in different brain regions. The scientists decoded that data into the song's acoustics using regression-based models, which reveal the relationship between different variables and an anticipated outcome. These models spit out a spectrogram, a visual representation of sound frequencies through time, which the team reconstructed as an audio file. 

The result: a melody that resembled — but was not identical to — the original one played to the participants.      

"There are certain segments of the song that you can clearly tell that the reconstruction is 'Another Brick in the Wall,'" Knight said. "There's certain segments you really can't …  It's too muddy."

"We're not trying to say we produced high-fidelity Pink Floyd," he added, but they did manage "to get a highly reliable spectrogram" from relatively few, well-placed electrodes.

Knight thinks the reconstructed song's quality would improve with higher-density electrodes; the ones the team used were spaced around 5 millimeters apart. "But we know that the cortex actually has independent information at one to one and a half millimeters," Knight said. Another limitation was that the researchers didn't probe participants' familiarity with the Pink Floyd song or their general music knowledge.

Pietro Avanzini, a neuroscience researcher at Italy's National Research Council who was not involved in the study, described the study as fascinating, as it reveals which parts of a person's neural machinery process different musical features. Moreover, it highlights differences in each person's brain's reaction to the same stimulus, "giving value (and potentially a neural basis) to the variability of our perceptual experience," he said.

Was there a reason the scientists chose to study "Another Brick in the Wall," in particular?

"I think we all like Pink Floyd," Knight said.

By examining a person's brain activity, artificial intelligence (AI) can produce a song that matches the genre, rhythm, mood and instrumentation of music that the individual recently heard.

Scientists have previously "reconstructed" other sounds from brain activity, such as human speech, bird song and horse whinnies. However, few studies have attempted to recreate music from brain signals.

Now, researchers have built an AI-based pipeline, called Brain2Music, that harnesses brain imaging data to generate music that resembles short snippets of songs a person was listening to when their brain was scanned. They described the pipeline in a paper, published July 20 to the preprint database arXiv, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. 

The scientists used brain scans that had previously been collected via a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the brain to see which regions are most active. The scans were collected from five participants as they listened to 15-second music clips spanning a range of genres, including blues, classical, country, disco, hip-hop, jazz and pop. 

Related: Musician's head injury triggered rare synesthesia, causing him to 'see' music 

Using a portion of the brain imaging data and song clips, the researchers first trained an AI program to find links between features of the music, including the instruments used and its genre, rhythm and mood, and participants' brain signals. The music's mood was defined by researchers using labels such as happy, sad, tender, exciting, angry or scary. 

The AI was customized for each person, drawing links between their unique brain activity patterns and various musical elements. 

After being trained on a selection of data, the AI could convert the remaining, previously unseen, brain imaging data into a form that represented musical elements of the original song clips. The researchers then fed this information into another AI model previously developed by Google, called MusicLM. MusicLM was originally developed to generate music from text descriptions, such as "a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff."

MusicLM used the information to generate musical clips that can be listened to online and fairly accurately resembled the original song snippets — although the AI captured some features of the original tunes much better than others.

"The agreement, in terms of the mood of the reconstructed music and the original music, was around 60%," study co-author Timo Denk, a software engineer at Google in Switzerland, told Live Science. The genre and instrumentation in the reconstructed and original music matched significantly more often than would be expected by chance. Out of all the genres, the AI could most accurately distinguish classical music.

"The method is pretty robust across the five subjects we evaluated," Denk said. "If you take a new person and train a model for them, it's likely that it will also work well."  

Ultimately, the aim of this work is to shed light on how the brain processes music, said co-author Yu Takagi, an assistant professor of computational neuroscience and AI at Osaka University in Japan.

As expected, the team found that listening to music activated brain regions in the primary auditory cortex, where signals from the ears are interpreted as sounds. Another region of the brain, called the lateral prefrontal cortex, seems to be important for processing the meaning of songs, but this needs to be confirmed by further research, Takagi said. This region of the brain is also known to be involved in planning and problem-solving. 

Interestingly, a past study found that the activity of different parts of the prefrontal cortex dramatically shifts when freestyle rappers improvise.  

Future studies could explore how the brain processes music of different genres or moods, Takagi added. The team also hopes to explore whether AI could reconstruct music that people are only imagining in their heads, rather than actually listening to.

After a musician suffered a head injury in a motorcycle accident, something unusual happened: He began to "see" music and developed heightened creativity for a few months, according to a new report of the case.

The man's traumatic brain injury (TBI) apparently caused him to develop synesthesia, a rare neurological condition that results in a "mixing" of the senses, his doctors wrote in the report. For example, some people with synesthesia see certain colors or shapes when they hear particular sounds. 

In the man's case, hearing music caused him to see the musical notes in his mind as they would be written on sheet music, which he had never experienced before. He also gained the ability to name the chords within a song just from listening alone. In addition, he reported that his creativity went into overdrive and he felt compelled to compose music late into the night, according to the report, which was published May 7 in the journal Neurocase.

Cases of people developing either synesthesia or heightened creativity following a brain injury have been reported before, but the new case is one of the first to report both phenomena in a single patient, the case report authors wrote. This suggests that similar neurological pathways may be involved in the two conditions, they added.

Related: 10 bizarre medical case reports from 2022 

"While TBI is typically associated with 'negative' outcomes, in which the patients' function is impaired, this was a unique case highlighting a 'positive' outcome of enhanced creativity and synesthesia," study co-author Dr. Lealani Mae Acosta, an associate professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Live Science in an email. 

Still, the authors cautioned that they don't know for certain if the man's brain injury directly caused his synesthesia and heightened creativity and that, if it did, this outcome is likely very rare. 

The 66-year-old man was teaching music following a career as a musical performer and composer, the report said. In 2021, he was in a motorcycle crash that threw him 30 feet (9 meters) from his vehicle. Afterward, he was confused and couldn't remember the crash. He was taken to the hospital, where a CT scan showed that blood had collected on the surface of his brain — a condition known as a subdural hematoma. The bleeding wasn't severe enough to require surgical treatment, and he was discharged from the hospital after three days.

The man experienced cognitive problems, particularly memory issues, as a result of his TBI, in addition to "seeing" notes when he heard live or recorded music. An online questionnaire to assess synesthesia, known as the Synesthesia Battery, confirmed that the patient indeed had vision-sound synesthesia, in which sounds trigger visual imagery, the authors wrote.

After the crash, the man reported experiencing bursts of creativity mostly between midnight and 4:00 a.m., during which he would compose. He told doctors "I was writing constantly [. . .]. It was unacceptable for me not to." These episodes lasted about four months, in which time the patient composed an ensemble piece that he later forgot he'd composed, the report said. When he and his wife listened to the piece, they both described it as "interesting and bizarre." 

The man's unique symptoms faded as he recovered from his TBI. Three months after his accident, he also reported that his cognitive difficulties had mostly gone away, the report said.

Synesthesia is uncommon, occurring in about 1 in 2,000 people. Most people who have the condition are born with it, but there have been reports of people who acquired synesthesia after a brain injury. Similarly, there have been cases of people becoming more creative after experiencing brain damage.

The case report authors noted that they know of just one other case of synesthesia and heightened creativity occurring together following brain injury, in which a woman felt compelled to paint after a stroke and experienced changes in her neuropathic pain (pain arising from damaged nerves) depending on the colors she used, the report authors wrote.

The neural causes of creativity and synesthesia aren't fully understood, but both may involve novel connections in the brain, the new report said.

One hypothesis is that creative thinking is tied to "cognitive disinhibition," or the idea that people have fewer mental filters to block out irrelevant information and this allows them to make novel associations, according to Psych Central. In people with synesthesia, it's possible that cognitive "filters" that would normally prevent a stimulus — a sound — from triggering an unrelated sensation — seeing colors — don't work as well. The patient in this case may have experienced a "temporary disinhibition syndrome" as a result of his TBI, which drove both his creativity and synesthesia, the report suggests.

Sure, not everyone has pipes like Adele. But we all know people who truly struggle to match and comprehend musical pitch, and they're usually labeled "tone deaf." But is tone deafness a real condition? And if so, why are some people tone deaf? 

In short, yes, tone deafness is a genuine neurological disorder. It's called amusia. However, not everyone who lacks musical skills has this condition, which affects an estimated 4% of the population.

Amusia can range in severity, from a mild difficulty in recognizing melodies to a complete inability to distinguish between different musical notes. But what causes this condition? For the majority of sufferers, it's hereditary, said Isabelle Peretz, a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal who specializes in the neurocognition of music.

"Most amusics are born that way. Half of their brothers and sisters are born that way, too, because congenital amusia is hereditary," Peretz told Live Science. "An impoverished musical environment does not seem to be the issue. Children as young as 8 have been shown to have amusia. They have the same abnormal profile as amusic adults."

Some people can develop amusia later in life, usually as a consequence of having a stroke or serious brain trauma. This is known as acquired amusia, and is a far less common form of the condition.

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"One of the main consequences of having congenital amusia is that you are likely to struggle with recognizing music you have heard before, without the help of song lyrics," Karen Wise, a research fellow at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, told Live Science. "But amusia varies from person to person, and so do the experiences of amusic people.

The most common form of amusia is pitch-based, Wise noted. A small 2002 study on 11 adults with musical impairments also found this, suggesting that congenital amusia is related to "severe deficiencies in processing pitch variations," the authors wrote in the paper, published in the journal Brain.

"Many amusics have elevated pitch perception thresholds, so the difference in pitch needs to be much bigger before they can perceive it," Wise said. "They may also struggle to perceive the difference between upward and downward pitch changes, and do not perceive the patterns made by sequences of musical notes.”

Despite this challenge, musically impaired people in the 2002 study were able to process and recognize common environmental sounds, human voices and speech prosody, or the rhythm and musical quality of speech, as "the disorder appears specific to the musical domain," the authors wrote in the study. For example, they were able to recognize when someone was asking a question versus making a statement, possibly because differences in speech intonation "use variations in pitch that are larger than half an octave, to convey relevant information," according to the study. "In contrast, melodies use mostly small pitch intervals."

That said, some studies show that people with pitch-based amusia do have difficulties processing melodic information in speech, Wise said. "However, usually intonation is not the only cue we rely on for understanding spoken communication, so in daily life this is likely to be much less noticeable," she added.

While some individuals with amusia are fully aware they have it, others can live for years — potentially their whole lives — without knowing about their condition. This is because tone deafness can manifest in different ways, and its severity varies from person to person. For instance, some people may have difficulty singing in tune or perceiving melody, while others may struggle to distinguish among instruments or notes. 

Some people may have unwittingly found ways to compensate for their condition by relying on other cues, such as lyrics or rhythm, which can mask their inability to perceive pitch accurately. 

"Like dyslexics can learn how to read, those with amusia should be able to improve [their ability to recognize tone] if they start early enough," Peretz said. 

Neural studies hint that it might be possible to help those with amusia.

"Brain imaging shows that amusic brains receive and respond to pitch information, but it is not reaching conscious awareness. The neurons fire in response to pitch differences that the person themselves can't distinguish," Wise said. "Maybe if we could develop training methods that would harness that unconscious response, we could find a way to overcome it."

In all, there appears to be an amusia continuum, Graham Welch, chair of the U.K.-based Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research, told Live Science. It's likely that "movement along the continuum is possible in a nurturing environment, either through conscious design pedagogically, or serendipity in the context of music making and experience in the home and local environment," he said.

If you are curious about whether you have amusia, you can take one of the tone deafness tests available online.

Two creatures sing sweetly to each other, exchanging a series of trills, cheeps and chirps. If you close your eyes and listen, you might believe you are hearing two birds. But you'd be mistaken. In fact, this is the vocal repertoire of a pair of Alston's singing mice (Scotinomys teguina), diminutive rodents that are found in the cloud forests of Central America and communicate by singing passionately to their companions. 

Their sounds mostly fall outside our audible range, and so researchers revealed their sweet symphonies by recording their vocalizations at a frequency we can hear. But their elusive calls also debunk a commonly held assumption: that songbirds are the only animals, other than humans, that sing. In fact, more animals sing to one another than you might expect. So which species do it? And do they sing only to find mates and mark their territory — or perhaps also, like us, simply because they enjoy it?

First, we need to understand what separates a song from other sounds. Few researchers claim to have a definitive answer. But at the simplest level, they define a song as a sequence of tones, which may be repeated over a period of time into something that resembles what we'd call a melody, explained Brian Farrell, a professor of biology at Harvard University who devotes part of his research to studying animal sounds in the natural world. Put simply, "all songs are sounds, but not all sounds are songs," Farrell told Live Science. By this definition, a dog's bark, a frog's croak or a cicada's high-pitched thrum aren't sounds that we would necessarily consider song-like.

Related: What's the chattiest animal?

Going a step further, you could say a song involves a degree of composition, which is aided by an ability to improvise, Farrell said. Interestingly, singing animals are frequently also those that learn their vocalizations from their parents, rather than being born with the ability; this flexible learning is thought to underpin the ability to improvise, he said. 

This definition is a highly subjective, human one. But singing is a "shorthand way for us to talk about a certain subset of animal signals that sound very musical to us," said Charles Snowdon, a primatologist and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies how animals communicate and animals' relationship to music. When we apply this definition, we start to uncover the hidden divas of the natural world. 

Take the Mexican free-tailed bat (Tadarida brasiliensis), which tries to attract the attention of females during mating season with a high-pitched tune (so high-pitched, in fact, that humans need to tune in with special audio equipment to hear it). When a male bat succeeds in grabbing the interest of a potential mate, things become interesting. Quickly, he upgrades his simple song to incorporate a variety of sequences, seemingly to keep the female intrigued long enough for mating to commence, according to a 2013 study in the journal Animal Behaviour. The bats can rapidly reorganize these sequences to suss out what the female likes — a true case of improvisation under pressure. 

Meanwhile, gibbons challenge humans as some of the most sublime singers of the primate world. Not all gibbon species sing, but those that do produce complex arias that usually intersperse long, whooping cries with shorter bursts of sound — using vocal mechanisms that researchers have discovered are common in opera singers, too. Their compositions are also context-dependent: Researchers have discovered that the predator alerts of some gibbon species have a unique arrangement of sounds not heard in regular calls, for instance. What's more, gibbon mates are also known for singing duets, which experts believe helps to strengthen social bonding and demarcate territory from other mating pairs.

Related: Why do birds sing the same song over and over?

These primates aren't the only animals that enjoy a sing-along, however. Alston's singing mice also sing duets, and they do it very courteously. The animals typically release a fast-paced stream of chirping (their songs can contain almost 100 notes), but studies show that one animal's songs will never, ever interrupt another's. In fact, each mouse pauses for a split second after its companion has finished, before it begins its own song. Neuroscientists have been investigating the neural basis of this pausing ability, to see what it might tell us about the evolutionary roots of human conversation, which may be based on turn-taking, too.

Meanwhile, no conversation about singing would be complete without the haunting melodies of the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). In 1970, American biologist Roger Payne captivated the public imagination when he carried out the first recordings of whale songs on vinyl and distributed them far and wide. The soulful songs made such an impact, in fact, that they are credited with helping to spur momentum against whaling through the 1970s, which eventually resulted in a near-worldwide moratorium, Farrell said. 

Payne's recordings also showed, for the first time, that the whales' crooning was made up of distinctive and repeating motifs. Payne "really was the first person to discover that these 20-minute utterances by whales are actually compositions," Farrell said. Since then, researchers have discovered that pods of whales have unique songs that can be used to identify them and that other whale species, including killer whales (Orcinus orca) and belugas (Delphinapterus leucas), sing too. 

What's there to sing about?

These are just a handful of the planet's singing species, and depending on how we define animals' wild melodies, there may be many more. But why do singing animals sing, rather than bark, bleat or buzz? In addition to competing for territory, mates and food, animals that inhabit the same acoustic space effectively have to "compete for bandwidth" to get heard, Farrell said. Singing, it turns out, has the advantages of transmitting over long distances and being able to carry lots of information in its lengthy sequences. That's useful when you're using it to demarcate territory, alert others to predators or woo a mate with impressive vocal feats, like free-tailed bats do. 

But beyond these functional roles, do any animals sing just for the sheer joy of it? Here, there are no hard-and-fast answers. But we do know that animals play and that they have "emotional lives," Farrell said. "Those two things are established, and there are very large literatures on them," he said. And there is also mounting evidence that animals have an emotional response to music. 

For instance, researchers have studied the impact of Mozart's compositions on mice, which can hear the music's highest-frequency tones, and they have found that the music lowers the mice's blood pressure, which is generally correlated with feelings of calm. To build on such discoveries, Snowdon decided to go a step further: 13 years ago, he began working with a cellist named David Teie, to determine if this relationship would hold up if they composed music especially for animals. They hypothesized that the animals would be even more likely to respond to music if it contained frequencies within their vocal and audible ranges, as well as a familiar tempo based on their heartbeat or pattern of vocalizations.

Related: What type of music do pets like?

In two separate studies, Snowdon and Teie decided to study cats and a monkey species called the cotton-top tamarin (Saguinus oedipus), and measure the creatures’ responses to a series of experimental animal ballads that Snowdon and Teie had composed. First, for the tamarins  they composed two distinctive tunes: one comprising of sharp, staccato beats that evoke a monkey's agitated chatter; and another piercing, whistling tune.  For cats, they composed a sequence of high-pitched, sliding notes set against a background beat that matched the tempo of a purr. In both cases, the specially composed music evoked a response. 

Their 2009 study on tamarins, published in the journal Biology Letters, showed that they could successfully calm or excite the monkeys depending on which tune they played. Meanwhile, in a 2015 study in Applied Animal Behaviour Science, their cat songs were met with interest from the felines, which were more likely to approach and rub against the speakers playing their unusual ditties — a sign of contentedness and pleasure — than the speakers playing regular tunes.

"That shows that there is an emotional component to music and that if we manipulate these emotional factors, we can change the behavior of animals," Snowdon said. In fact, when a separate set of researchers tested Snowdon and Teie's cat compositions in the real-world setting of a veterinary clinic, "they found that playing cat music kept the animals calmer during a veterinary examination than either human music or silence did," Snowdon said. 

The fact that composed songs can have this effect on animals has led some to consider that music's emotional impact may have deeper evolutionary roots than we realize, which could shed light on its profound effect on humans, Snowdon said. That's an ongoing area of research. Meanwhile, can we conclude from this that animals sing purely for enjoyment? Farrell is inclined to think there is an emotional component to animal song, but that is beyond our current research capacity to confirm, he said — adding that "the most interesting questions are the hardest to test."

Thinking of the gibbon's playful whoop, the singing mouse's empathetic chatter and the whale's soulful melody, it's difficult to believe that there isn't emotion and joy woven into animal songs. But that's a mystery for another day. 

Originally published on Live Science.

When doctors checked the man's pulse, they couldn't believe their ears — they heard music playing, loud and clear, as if someone had turned on a radio.

The 65-year-old man arrived at the hospital after he experienced a fall and dislocated his hip, according to a report of the case, published Saturday (Dec. 19) in The New England Journal of Medicine. Previously, the man had undergone hip-replacement surgery on both hips, the report said.

As the man lay in his hospital bed, doctors checked the pulse in his feet using a Doppler (ultrasound) device.

But then something bizarre happened: In addition to the thump thump of the man's heart, they heard music through the device's speaker. (In a video accompanying the report, an upbeat tune with someone singing, possibly in Spanish, can be heard filling the room. The app Shazam identifies the song as "Gracias Por Tu Amor" by Banda El Recodo De Cruz Lizárraga.) The music played only when the Doppler was placed on the man's feet. It didn't happen when hospital staff used the device on themselves. 

Related: 27 oddest medical cases

The authors suspect the Doppler may have picked up a radio signal that was being received by the patient's prosthetic hips, the report said. It's also possible this signal was being received by other equipment in the room, such as the patient's hospital bed.

The authors reported their findings to their hospital's engineering department, and no faulty equipment was found. 

Eight months later, the patient was doing well and had not experienced any more falls, and had not transmitted any other phantom music, the report said.

Originally published on Live Science.  

Veteran rock band Kiss has played for millions of people around the world, over more than four decades. But today (Nov. 18), Kiss performs for a new type of audience in waters off the coast of Australia: great white sharks.

The band will take the stage on a boat in the Indian Ocean and blast their music through underwater speakers. A small group of eight humans will rock out on a second boat with a glass viewing panel, so they can see the sharks that swim up to investigate the concert.   

The concert, presented by Airbnb, is part of a 12-hour tour to an offshore location near Port Lincoln, Australia, that is known as a feeding ground for great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), an Airbnb representative told Live Science in an email. Rather than using the traditional "chum" —  fish parts and blood strewn in the water to attract the sharks — organizers hope the music will draw the ocean predators in, the representative said.

Related: 7 Unanswered Questions About Sharks

This admittedly "over-the-top experience" was created "to educate people and show them that sharks are worthy of respect, empathy and protection," according to Airbnb. Throughout the day, concertgoers will observe sharks and other marine life in their natural habitat, guided by shark researcher and conservationist Blake Chapman, an editor-at-large for Australian Geographic. 

Studies have shown that sharks can learn to respond to music cues; great white sharks have even demonstrated attraction to heavy metal, according to a documentary broadcast on the Discovery Channel in 2015. But how do sharks hear music, and will they acknowledge Kiss' invitation to rock and roll all night and party every day?

Wall of sound

Unlike humans, sharks don't have outer ears; they listen to their environment through a hole on each side of their head that opens into an inner ear, said Catarina Vila Pouca, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University in Sweden. 

Sharks also have an extra sensory system that mammals lack, known as the lateral line, Vila Pouca told Live Science in an email. This system, found in most bony fish, consists of a canal that runs through the shark's body and is connected to pores in the skin. 

"Both the inner ear and the lateral line have modified sensory hair cells that detect vibrations in the water surrounding the shark," Vila Pouca explained. "These vibrations can come from water turbulence, fish swimming near them or sounds, because sound is produced and propagated by vibrations in the medium — in this case, water." 

Large sharks are especially sensitive to pulsing, low-frequency sounds, possibly because these sounds mimic the noise made by prey in distress, scientists reported in the journal Science in 1963. 

Related: 5 Scary Shark Myths Busted

In 2018 research published in the journal Animal Cognition, Vila Pouca reported that Port Jackson sharks (Heterodontus portusjacksoni) could recognize the sound of a jazz song. Five of the eight sharks the researchers tested learned to respond to the music by swimming to a corner of their tank to receive a food reward, Vila Pouca said.

The relentless, driving beat of rock music — especially the dense, bass-thrumming beats of hard rock and heavy metal — can even attract wild sharks in the open ocean, as Matt Waller, shark tour operator and owner of Adventure Bay Charters in Australia, discovered in 2011.

Waller had heard from a shark tour colleague who experimented with underwater speakers that the sharks behaved differently in the presence of music — particularly rock music, he told Live Science in an email. Waller decided to test his own underwater sound system, and a shark appeared near the boat within the first 10 minutes. 

"When AC/DC's 'Back in Black' was on, he kept rubbing his face on the speaker — and we knew we were onto something," Waller said. Over time, Waller tried many types of music, with varying degrees of success in attracting sharks. "What worked one week didn't always work the next," he said. And some sharks responded differently than others to certain tracks. One shark, a female, would swim up and leap from the water whenever the crew played the Talking Heads song "Sax and Violins," Waller recalled.

"We started paying more attention to the different sharks," he said. However, the crew's observations were only anecdotal, as they were not working in a controlled environment. In 2015, when the Discovery Channel filmed Waller playing heavy metal underwater (tunes by the band Darkest Hour, from Washington, D.C.), the music attracted the attention of two great white sharks; one was 12 feet (3.7 meters) long, and one was 14 feet (4.3 m) long.

Shout it out loud

Now, Waller is partnering with Airbnb to broadcast Kiss' music to great whites. Guitarist Paul Stanley guessed that the apex predators would prefer the Kiss songs "Lick It Up" and "I Want You," he told Rolling Stone.

Sound travels easily through water, and sharks' sensory systems are fine-tuned to detect faint vibrations, raising the possibility that the loud rock music will be stressful for them, and for other marine life near the concert, Vila Pouca said.

"But, of course, this concert is an isolated event and pales in comparison with the extent of sound pollution that we have in the ocean," she added. While the Kiss show is certainly an unusual approach for bringing people and sharks together, perhaps the common ground of rock and roll will encourage a greater awareness of sharks as creatures that are vital to ocean ecosystems and deserving of respect rather than fear, Vila Pouca told Live Science.

"Sharks are very smart and complex animals, capable of learning and remembering associations, with distinct personalities and with complex social lives," she said. "Big events like this concert should encourage a positive public opinion of sharks, which is vital in changing public and political will towards appropriate shark conservation and management strategies." 

• In Photos: Great White Sharks Attack
• Images: Sharks and Whales from Above
• In Photos: Glow-in-the-Dark Sharks

Originally published on Live Science.

In a blow to dubstep fans everywhere, a team of insect researchers has found that female mosquitoes listening to Skrillex had less sex and sucked less blood than mosquitoes who spent 10 minutes in silence.

The authors of the new study, published March 25 in the journal Acta Tropica, wanted to test whether loud music could be used to manipulate mosquito behavior as an "environmentally friendly" alternative to insecticides. Because mating and blood-sucking are the main means by which mosquitoes transmit deadly diseases like Zika virus and dengue fever, interrupting those behaviors with obnoxious noise could also mitigate the spread of disease, the authors wrote.

In their study, the researchers tested their hypothesis by blasting electronic music from a speaker set up near a cage of hungry female mosquitoes who had gone 12 hours without a meal. The cage also contained one virgin male mosquito (for sex) and a restrained hamster (for lunch). In a series of 10-minute trials, groups of 10 female mosquitoes were continuously swapped into the cage while the Skrillex song "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" played on repeat. The researchers chose this song because its excessive loudness and constantly escalating pitch made it a prime candidate for "noisiness," the team wrote. [Googly Eyes: Photos of Striking Wasp Faces]

When the team compared the mating and feeding behaviors of the Skrillex mosquitoes to those of a control group, whose cage was silent, they found that the noise-addled bugs had significantly less sex and sucked less blood than their quiet-space counterparts.

Despite having gone 12 hours since their last feeding, the mosquitoes in the musical group were so distracted by Skrillex's barrage of vibrations that most did not start looking for food until an average of 2 or 3 minutes of the song had elapsed. Nonmusical mosquitoes, meanwhile, homed in on the hamster after an average of 30 seconds. Once they finally found the prey, Skrillex mosquitoes also made fewer attempts to suck blood than control mosquitoes did.

Skrillex mosquitoes also had about five times less sex than mosquitoes flying in silence. The researchers said the music's aggressive vibrations may have confused mosquitoes who were trying to synchronize their wing beats — an insect equivalent of swiping right.

"Both males and females produce sounds through the beating of their wings," the authors wrote. "For successful mating to occur, the male must harmonize its flight tone with that of its partner using auditory sensitivity."

The results of this study harmonize well with previous research that has linked human-made noise to the disruption of insect behavior. Similar studies have found that leaf-eating insects get distracted from their meals when exposed to the pulses and chirps of an audio oscillator and that beetles who listen to AC/DC's rock classic "Back in Black" eat fewer aphids than beetles who forage in silence. ("In some contexts," those researchers concluded, "rock and roll is noise pollution.")

• Gallery: Out-of-This-World Images of Insects
• Goliath Birdeater: Images of a Colossal Spider
• The Cutest Bugs in The World

Originally published on Live Science.

When Freddie Mercury sang, "Mama, life had just begun," in the second verse of "Bohemian Rhapsody," he probably didn't have an audience of fetuses in mind. Let's consider it a happy coincidence, then, that unborn babies really do seem to love Queen.

According to a new, as-yet-unpublished study by the Institut Marquès assisted-fertility clinic in Spain, fetuses exposed to "Bohemian Rhapsody" — as well as classic jams by Bach and Mozart — showed clear signs of mental stimulation in the womb. Songs by Shakira and the Bee Gees, on the other hand, proved much less interesting to the unborn audience.

Developing babies begin to hear external sounds at a gestational age of about 16 weeks, which is —it's safe to say — far too soon to have read an issue of Rolling Stone. So why should fetuses be such discerning music critics? According to the researchers, it might have something to do with the pitch of the song's sounds or the simplicity of the melody. [That's Incredible! 9 Brainy Baby Abilities]

"The first language was more musical than verbal," Dr. Marisa López-Teijón, director of the Institut Marquès, said in a statement. "We still tend instinctively to speak [to newborns] in a high-pitched voice, because we know that newborns perceive those better, and this way they understand that we want to communicate with them." (Interestingly, fetuses in the study also showed a greater response to Mickey Mouse's voice than to recordings of a normal human voice.)

"I'm big in the womb."

In the new study, which was presented this month at the International Association for Music and Medicine conference in Barcelona, Spain, researchers blasted a variety of tunes for 300 fetuses between 18 and 38 weeks of gestation.

Using a special intravaginal speaker (babies can't hear much through the mom's abdominal wall), the team played 15 songs for each fetus, ranging from sonatas by Bach and Beethoven, to traditional Spanish Christmas carols, to the hits of Queen, Adele and the Village People.

While the fetuses listened, the researchers watched for mouth and tongue movements on an ultrasound machine. They hypothesized that the babies who moved their mouths or tongues in response to the music were having the language centers of their brains stimulated and perhaps were learning to communicate back.

"Our initial hypothesis suggests that music creates a response which manifests as vocalization movements as it activates the brain circuits that stimulate language and communication," the researchers wrote on their website.

Overall, the fetuses seemed more stimulated by classical music than pop or rock. Ninety-one percent of the babies showed mouth movements, and 73 percent stuck out their tongues when Mozart's "A Little Night Music" played. Melodies by Bach, Prokofiev and Strauss all got more than 80 percent of the fetuses flapping their itty-bitty gums.

More than 80 percent of the fetuses responded to traditional drumbeats from Africa, a mantra from India and a Christmas carol from Spain. When it came to pop, however, the burgeoning critics were far more discerning. Their favorite song was, of course, "Bohemian Rhapsody" (90 percent of babies moved their mouths, and 40 percent stuck out their tongues), followed by the Village People's "Y.M.C.A."

Songs by Adele, the Bee Gees and Shakira impressed 60 percent or less of the fetuses.

These results jibe with those of previous studies that have linked classical music (played outside the womb, not intravaginally) to infant stimulation. However, if the findings don't jibe with your personal taste in music, don't sweat it too much. Mouth and tongue movements are rare in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, the researchers wrote, so the bottom line is that any musical stimulation is more than most babies are used to.

Besides, fetuses can't hear much over the constant noise of their mothers' hard-working bodies, anyway. The real musical education begins after birth — you know, when baby is really able to rock out.

Originally published on Live Science.

That's because the percussionist isn't a human, but a bird: the palm cockatoo (Probosciger aterrimus) of Australia and New Guinea. The cockatoo is the only nonhuman animal on record to rhythmically drum with a customized "sound tool," but its reason for drumming isn't so different from that of many human musicians: These feathered Romeos are looking for love, the researchers found.

During courtship, male cockatoos search for drumsticks, sometimes breaking a sturdy branch off a tree and trimming it down to about 8 inches (20 centimeters) in length. Then, the cockatoos rhythmically strike the tool against their nesting tree, wooing potential mates with a steady beat, the researchers said. [Image Gallery: A Crafty Cockatoo Uses Tools]

"The female watches the male very closely, including the tool manufacture part, which demonstrates the power of the male's beak when he snips off the branch," said study lead researcher Robert Heinsohn, a professor in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at Australian National University.

Drumming solo

Heinsohn first came across the drumming cockatoos while studying a different parrot species on Cape York Peninsula in North Queensland, Australia, in 1997.

"I was walking through the rainforest and heard a clear tapping sound ahead," Heinsohn told Live Science in an email. "It was a beautiful male palm cockatoo striking the edge of a hollow in the tree trunk with a stick. I have never been so mesmerized by anything in nature, and swore that one day I would undertake the research necessary to understand why they do this."

Fulfilling that promise took seven years, as Heinsohn and his colleagues stealthily recorded video of the cockatoos before egg-laying season began in June and July (winter in the Southern Hemisphere). Before the researchers' study, a brief note in a 1984 bird journal was the only description of the cockatoos' rhythmic behavior, Heinsohn said. 

After collecting 131 recordings from 18 male cockatoos, the researchers used computer software to convert the recordings into spectrograms (visual displays of sound). Statistician consultations showed "beyond any doubt that these birds are rhythmic," meaning that the beats weren't random, but rather were equally spaced apart, Heinsohn said. 

Moreover, the statistical analysis showed that each of the 18 birds had its own distinct style. Some beats were faster and others were slower, and "interestingly, some males had a fast flourish of beats when they started and then slowed down to a steady beat," Heinsohn said.

These findings show that cockatoos share several key components seen in human instrumental music, including making a sound tool (the drumstick), performing in a consistent context (in this case, mating), making regular beats and creating individualistic styles, the researchers said in the study.

Other animals are known to drum, too, including rodents that stomp their feet, woodpeckers that peck, and chimps that drum their hands and feet on tree stumps. But none of these percussive sounds are rhythmic, nor do these animals make a special sound tool, Heinsohn said.

Mating scene

There's a reason why male palm cockatoos put on a spectacular show: Female palm cockatoos lay just one egg once every two years. [Pretty Bird: Images of a Clever Parrot]

During courtship, males try to attract females using different calls (screeches or whistles), movements (head bobbing or wing raising) and blushing to show they're sexually excited, Heinsohn said.

"The drumming and rhythm seems to be an extra component designed to impress the females further," he said, noting that not all males drum. However, those that do tend to put on a solo act — there aren't any "drum circles" in the cockatoo world, Heinsohn said.

These avian drumming acts, some lasting up to 30 minutes, may shed light on how humans began producing rhythms, the scientists said. Perhaps drumming began as a sexual display among humans before it was used for other purposes, such as for interacting with large groups, the researchers said.

But there is one glaring difference between cockatoo and human percussive rhythm: While many humans dance to drum beats, there is no evidence that wild palm cockatoos do, the researchers said.

The study was published online today (June 28) in the journal Science Advances. 

Original article on Live Science.

Some 70 years ago, computer scientist Alan Turing famously set the bar for artificial intelligence: a computer that could convince a human conversation partner that it was a person.

On a recent spring afternoon in the Flow Machines laboratory, located on a quiet street in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, senior researcher Pierre Roy was more concerned with his music-making AI software's ability to create a convincingly catchy song.

"So far, from the technical standpoint, no one knows how to do a proper song, to tell a story," he said. "It's a hot topic in AI."

Flow Machines, a project of Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris that receives funding from the European Research Council, is developing an AI program that can compose compelling, professional-quality music — an aim shared by similar ventures such as Jukedeck in the UK and Google's Magenta project.

Ever since Turing defined his test, popular culture has fixated on the idea of sentient AI, both benign and catastrophically malign. But AI today has become something of a catch-all term for software that augments human intelligence, usually by mining vast troves of data. It's become commonplace in everyday life — asking Siri to find the nearest Chipotle, listening to a Discover Weekly personalized playlist on Spotify, or letting Facebook auto-tag you or your friends in a photo.

What makes AI different from traditional data analytics programs is its capacity to teach itself to recognize patterns using machine learning algorithms, and then make autonomous decisions based on those patterns without being explicitly programmed to do so.

Flow Machines' technology is no different. The project's AI machine is not a self-aware robot that yearns to write a love song — not yet, anyway. It's a set of complex algorithms that has been given 15,000 songs to analyze.

When Benoît Carré, the project's artistic director, wants to compose a new song, he sets his program loose on a selection of music from their database — a bossa nova playlist, perhaps, or his favorite Charlie Parker tunes. He runs an analytical model known as a Markov chain that identifies patterns in those selections and then imitates and varies them to create its own original composition.

The computer calculates the probability of certain chord progressions, melodic sequences, and rhythms, and uses these probabilities to generate new, plausible variations.

"We don't give the machine musical rules or abstract musical knowledge," explained Roy. "It's only the machine producing music based on what it learned from the data."

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At this point in the process, the Flow Machines system requires the intervention of human expertise. Carré might keep an eight-bar phrase he likes and reject the rest, running the program again until he has a melody and a chord sequence that he's happy with.

Last September, Flow Machines unveiled its first single. "Daddy's Car" is a summery, upbeat pop song based on a selection of Beatles tunes. The song is tuneful, but undeniably a pastiche and somehow bewildering, triggering an odd nostalgia for a non-existent memory. It was accompanied by an irregular take on the Great American Songbook, the less accessible "Mr. Shadow."

All the stylistic flourishes — the harmonies, instrumentation, and the lyrics — are thanks to Carré. What the computer spits out is pretty basic. Songs are entered into the database in their most barebones form — a lead sheet with just chord labels and a melody — and that's how the computer composes as well. Carré is responsible for all the production touches and details that give a song its distinctive sound.

This offers Carré a great deal of artistic license in the rendering and production phase, but also places constraints on what kind of music the program can interpret and produce.

"It only can be used for the type of music that can be represented by a lead sheet," said Roy. "Classical wouldn't make sense ... even techno or trance wouldn't make sense. Only music based on harmonized melodies, that is Western popular music, that can be reduced to notes and chords."

The limitations of this particular technology beg the question: When we thrill to a certain phrase of music, what is it that we're responding to? And can we expect a machine to ever recreate an expression we consider to be so fundamentally human?

RELATED: Killer Machines and Sex Robots: Unraveling the Ethics of AI

Marvin Minsky, who founded MIT's AI Lab and is considered one of the forefathers of the field, notably hypothesized that humans take pleasure in self-contained, repetitive patterns and their variations because they allow us to comprehend and play with time.

Advances in neuroimaging have offered deeper insight into this idea. Neuroscience researchers from McGill University and the Rotman Research Institute have found that when people listen to music they enjoy, the parts of their brain linked to reward and motivation light up. Listening to passages of music that cause us to react with particular intensity — those that give us "chills" — initiates a rush of dopamine, the "reward" neurotransmitter associated with pleasure that has been linked to sex, food, and falling in love. 

Interestingly, dopamine is released in anticipation of the peak emotional moment as well as during it.

"We build expectations and delight when they are creatively violated, whether by composers or in the performer's interpretations," explained Jonathan Berger, a composer and professor of music at Stanford University.

By this logic, AI should, in theory, eventually be able to identify the patterns of expectation, disruption, deferral, and eventual satisfaction that we find the most pleasurable and produce melodies that give us chills — although "Daddy's Car" suggests they have some way to go yet.

Even if the next song produced by Flow Machines appeals to a number of people, Berger is skeptical that the program is capable of producing truly great art.

Beyond pattern repetition and variation, he said, "music (at least great music) is multilayered and unfolds in multiple time scales. Pattern replication generally lacks the large-scale contexts that constitute a significant aspect of art."

The Flow Machines team counter that this isn't necessarily the point. They see their machine not as a way to sideline artists but as a tool to augment human creativity, and hopefully send it off in novel directions that otherwise may not have been possible.

"What's really nice is that the songs sound very different from anything else, including what Benoît was doing before," Roy said of the material being produced by the lab.

RELATED: What Happens If We Give AI the Ability to Remember Everything?

Flow Machines will release a full album before the end of the year — the first ever composed by AI — and are inviting a range of artists to collaborate, including Ash Workman, British synth-pop band NZCA Lines, and electronic duo Darkstar.

Carré hopes to bring together different musical styles but link them under an over-arching conceptual theme, taken from one of Hans Christian Anderson's darker fairy tales about a writer who loses, and re-discovers, his shadow.

"It's like a mirror, a play on identity, so it's interesting with what we are doing," he said, adding that there were also parallels to be drawn with his goal of AI contributing to stylistic diversity.

"The shadow, in the tale it is traveling, and the more it travels, the more it lives," Carré said.

It bears mentioning that in the fairy tale the shadow eventually becomes corrupt, exchanges places with, and then kills the idealistic writer. So perhaps an echo of the malign AI is with us yet.

Ed Newton-Rex, a founder of Jukedeck in London, says his company, which offers to make custom soundtracks for videos, is also partly motivated by the idea of increasing access to what has historically been a somewhat rarified industry — at least in the classical world in which Newton-Rex trained.

"I did nothing but music for 21 years, studied music at Cambridge, was going down route of becoming a classical composer," he said. "In terms of democratization, once computers can write music they can give tools to people who don’t have this huge musical education and let them get involved in the music-writing process."

But unlike Flow Machines, Jukedeck has begun experimenting with using AI for every step of the process, including synthesizing the computer's composition into a fully-realized track. The technology is still in its early days, but Newton-Rex sees no reason why computers couldn't one day make the leap from pastiche to truly creative art.

"It's hard to argue that even very disruptive innovations aren't built on some preceding model and preceding experience," he remarked. "Having said that, part of the problem with asking if computers can be creative is defining what creativity is in the first place. We haven't agreed as a society what it is and how it works."

Jukedeck is using slightly different tech from Flow Machines: neural networks that imitate the human brain. These require much more training data than Markov Chains but, once trained, can be more powerful.

Roy and Carré freely admit that some of the implications and consequences of their creation may be out of their hands — and that's part of the excitement.

"With rap, or disco, often it's a new technology that creates a new style," said Carré. He gestured to an Akai sampler sitting among an array of keyboards, headphones, and espresso cups. Launched in the 1980s, the Akai allowed artists in the emerging hip-hop scene to sample classic tracks and produce beats without a drum kit.

"At the beginning, a lot of people were afraid that the pianist and the drummers will be replaced, but it never happens this way," Carré added. "It's humans that find the ways to use [tech] to make interesting things."

Originally published on Seeker.

In the days following Chuck Berry's death, commentators have trampled over each other in a race to honor him as the "Father of Rock and Roll," the art form's lodestone and mastermind. They've marveled at his songs, not just because of how witty, influential and danceable they were, but because they were the work of Berry alone.

A few have mentioned a lawsuit involving Berry's longtime piano player Johnnie Johnson, where Johnson claimed he was Berry's co-writer, but which the court dismissed because he took too long to sue. And that's all they say.

As a St. Louis lawyer, teacher and music geek, I had heard about the case a few years back and wondered if there was more to the story than simply "Johnson sued too late."

I felt this case was still important, given the songs' seismic cultural influence, as well as Berry's notorious reluctance to discuss his creative process ("Talking to Chuck Berry about his music is a little like meeting God and finding out He doesn't remember making the Earth or care what people do there," author and MTV executive Bill Flanagan once wrote).

So I reached out to the attorneys, and they gave me access to the case file, which, until then, had been gathering dust in storage, unavailable for study. First, in 2015, I used it to explore authorship in copyright law. But now, as we reflect on Chuck Berry's life, I think the case of Johnson v. Berry has an even greater meaning: a search for truth in the fog of legend.

‘In a roundabout sense, I suppose he did'

On Aug. 21, 2002, sitting in a nondescript little conference room inside a St. Louis law firm, Chuck Berry was asked something that called into question not only his own legacy, but that of rock and roll itself.

Two years prior, Johnnie Johnson had sued Berry. In his suit, Johnson claimed he'd co-written, on his piano, nearly every song in Berry's remarkable 1950s and ‘60's run – "Roll Over Beethoven," "Back in the U.S.A." and "Nadine," among many others – classics that helped sow the seeds of a worldwide musical and cultural revolution.

Having gotten neither credit nor a dime of the millions in royalties those songs had generated, Johnson set out – nearly 50 years later – to rewrite history via the courts.

Though the case had started slow – lawyers jousting, sending letters, serving subpoenas – on that day in August 2002, inside that little conference room, Johnson's attorney had the chance to ask Chuck Berry, in person and under oath, the question that cut to the heart of the case:

"No" or even "Hell no" would have been perfectly acceptable (and, to Berry's lawyers, highly desirable) answers. But instead, Berry's response was profoundly equivocal:

A good trial lawyer could've made a lot of hay with that: "Mr. Berry has testified that Johnnie Johnson helped create these songs in a roundabout sense…just not in a legal sense," one can easily picture a jury hearing in closing argument, "but you, ladies and gentlemen, get to decide how the law applies here, not Mr. Berry."

A jury, however, would never hear the case. On Oct. 21, 2002, just two weeks before trial was set to begin, the judge ruled against Johnson. He decided that the statute of limitations had expired – Johnson had waited too many years to sue – and that was that. Or was it?

Father(s) of rock and roll?

In the course of Berry's sworn deposition, and Johnson's own, taken two months earlier, the two men spoke more expansively about their part in rock and roll's creation than they ever had before – or ever would again.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, they spoke most freely when discussing how they worked together.

From Johnson:

And from Berry:

They even played their instruments – Johnson on piano and Berry on guitar and piano – trying to show what they did and how they did it.

Neither man would bend on his respective legal position. On that, reasonable minds can disagree. It's not easy to mark the point at which a creative contributor becomes a co-author. But both men were candid about the creative process, itself, and how it was fueled by their musical interplay. That is what's most instructive for us today.

Most of us view Berry as the self-reliant father of rock and roll, the mastermind who created these amazing songs essentially from scratch. Others see Johnson as the jilted, true composer of the music that turned Berry's lyrics into classic songs.

But read what Berry and Johnson have said themselves, under oath, and you can see it was a collaboration – their unspoken musical bond – that gets closest to the truth of how these classic, wildly influential songs were born.

Society often constructs (and then fights to preserve) myths around individual genius. Collaboration – with past influences, as well as with present partners – isn't nearly as sexy. But it's how works of genius regularly get written, designed, sculpted, filmed and recorded. From the songs of Leiber and Stoller and Holland-Dozier-Holland, to the film "Casablanca," to the writings of Raymond Carver, collaborative creativity has produced many of our most prized cultural treasures, often without our knowing it.

And sometimes, perhaps, an individual genius finds a partner, one who helps him hit a creative zenith higher than he could've reached alone. Recognizing this in the story of Chuck Berry – or at least acknowledging its possibility – doesn't detract from his legacy; it honors it more deeply.

Near the end of the film "Hail! Hail! Rock 'n' Roll," director Taylor Hackford asked Berry how he wanted to be remembered.

"I tell you what," Berry replied. "Whatever it be, I just hope it's real and it's a fact, which will be the truth. That's it. I hope they'll just speak the truth be it pro, con, bad, good."

Amen, Chuck.

Tim McFarlin, Fellow, Elon University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

There are some songs that just beg to become embedded in your brain. "It's a Small World." "My Sharona." "YMCA."

Even a die-hard Village People fan is bound to get a little annoyed the 70-millionth time "It's fun to stay at the Y, M, C, A!" screeches through their skull. But why are sticky songs — earworms, as they're known — so hard to dislodge? And what kinds of songs are likely to get stuck in our brains, anyway?

A few disparate studies hold at least some answers. First of all, common earworms seem to share some features, researchers have found. They're songs you've heard a lot (which may be why current radio hits tend to dominate "Top 10 Earworm" lists). They often have repetitive notes or unexpected intervals in timing. They also have distinctive rhythms and pitch patterns. [What Type of Music Do Pets Like?]

"The overall conclusion is that the song has to be quite simple in order to be recalled spontaneously, but also have something a bit unique that makes the brain want to rehearse it over and over," said Kelly Jakubowski, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Music at Durham University in the U.K.

A common phenomenon

Scientists sometimes refer to earworms as "involuntary musical imagery," or INMI. A 2012 study published in the journal Psychology of Music found that about 90 percent of Finnish internet users reported getting a song stuck in their head at least once a week. The more musical the person, the more earworms they were likely to experience, that study found, and that result has been backed up by other surveys. One 2006 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies detailed the experience of a pianist and a composer who had almost constant INMI — 24/7 earworms, or perpetual music tracks (PMTs).

"I find almost nothing pleasurable about having a PMT [perpetual music track]," the pianist wrote. "Rather, it is quite a distraction most of the time, the kind of thing I wish I could turn off."

The pianist's distaste for earworms extended even to songs that he found most emotive, he wrote — mainly because the most affecting music was also a distraction from real life. People often think that annoying songs are the ones most likely to get stuck in people's heads, Jakubowski told Live Science, but survey results suggest that only about a third of earworms are unpleasant. However, those times when "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" ends up on mental repeat may simply be more memorable than the times when a favorite song becomes an earworm.

"It tends to be a bit of a bias that we have toward remembering those negative experiences," Jakubowski said.  

Earworm-ready music

Like it or not, the brain gloms on to recent and frequently heard songs. A 2013 study in the journal Psychology of Music, for example, found that the more familiar the song, the more likely it was to become an earworm. Participants didn't have to think too hard about the music to get it stuck in their heads, as anyone who has started humming along to a grocery-store soundtrack can probably attest: The researchers found that asking study participants questions about the songs, to make them process the music more deeply, did not affect the chance that the music would go full-earworm on them. [Why Do Certain Songs Bring Pleasure?]

Research presented at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in 2012 in Thessaloniki, Greece, found that longer notes with smaller intervals of pitch between them made for stickier earworms, perhaps because long notes and limited changes in pitch are simply easier to sing (think "It's a Small World" versus an operatic aria).

Jakubowski's research — published in November 2016 in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts — did not find the same relationship between long notes, small intervals and earworms, but it did suggest that the easier a song was to sing, the more likely it was to get stuck in people's heads. That research, based on surveys conducted between 2010 and 2013, compared earworms to similarly popular songs that were never cited as earworms. The study found that Lady Gaga was quite the earworm generator, with "Bad Romance," "Alejandro" and "Poker Face" all making the Top 10 list of songs that frequently got stuck in people's heads.

"Having listened to quite a lot of [the songs] when I was doing this study, I did end up with quite a lot of them stuck in my head," Jakubowski said. "Bad Romance" was one of the worst offenders, she added.

These sticky songs had faster tempos than non-earworm songs, Jakubowski and her colleagues found. Earworms were also likely to share pitch patterns that are common in Western music, particularly opening riffs that start out rising and then fall in pitch. Examples include "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and Maroon 5's earworm "Moves Like Jagger."

"Earworm songs are making use of these really quite simple overall melodic patterns," Jakubowski said.

But a dash of surprise seemed to help a song become sticky, too. Within these common structures, the researchers found that earworms tended to have unusual melodic features, like more leaps between pitches than typically expected in a pop song, or larger leaps in pitch. Earworms like The Knack's "My Sharona" and the Beastie Boys' "Intergalactic" are examples of songs with those unusual features, the researchers wrote.

Can't get you out of my head

So why does the brain do this to us? There may be some individual differences in earworm susceptibility, as is suggested by the consistent finding that musicians have songs stuck in their heads more frequently than nonmusicians. The 2012 research presented in Greece found that people with subclinical obsessive-compulsive traits (meaning they do not have the disorder but do have a tendency toward prevarication and worry) reported earworms more frequently than people who were less obsessive-compulsive.

People are more likely to pick up an earworm when they are doing something routine, like jogging or chores, according to 2010 research.

It's not totally clear what's going on in the brain during earworm episodes, but a 2005 paper published in the journal Nature found that the auditory cortex — the part of the temporal lobe that processes sound — was involuntarily activated when participants listened to familiar songs in which a section was muted. In other words, the brain was compelled to "fill in the blank" in the missing music. The researchers could even tell the difference between the auditory cortex filling in lyrics, in which case specific auditory association areas that are key to interpreting sounds became active, or imagining instrumentals, in which case more primary, basic sound-processing areas were at play.

Because earworms are involuntary, it's tricky to get rid of them on purpose. For the 2010 earworm study published in the British Journal of Psychology, the researchers asked a dozen people to record their earworm episodes in a diary and found that the more people tried to consciously get rid of an earworm, the longer the song remained stuck in their head. The process of thinking about an earworm to attempt to banish it likely just keeps the tune fresh in the brain, the researchers wrote. However, they added that it might also be that the stickiest, most annoying songs are the ones that people attempt to get rid of, and that those songs are somehow less amenable to banishment than the ones that people happily go on humming. 

Original article on Live Science. 

The chemicals in the brain linked to the pleasure people get from things like sex and drugs also play a role in how people enjoy music, a new, small study from Canada finds.

When people in the study took a drug to block the chemical compounds in the brain that activate the so-called pleasure center, they no longer responded to music, according to the study, published today (Feb. 8) in the journal Scientific Reports.

Pleasure, or reward, is experienced in two phases in the brain, according to the study. The first phase is the anticipatory, or "wanting" phase, which is driven by the neurotransmitter dopamine. The second phase is the consummatory, or "liking" phase, and is driven by opioids in the brain, the researchers wrote. [10 Surprising Facts About the Brain]

"This is the first demonstration that the brain's own opioids are directly involved in musical pleasure," senior study author Daniel Levitin, a professor of psychology at McGill University in Canada, said in a statement.

Previous studies have shown that opioids play a role in the pleasure people derive from experiences such as sex, food and drugs, according to the study.

To determine whether opioids also played a role in how people experience pleasure from music, the researchers gave participants a drug called naltrexone that blocks the effects of opioids in the brain (the second phase of pleasure).

In the study, 15 participants were asked to select two songs they considered very pleasurable. In addition to the pleasurable music, the researchers also selected "emotionally neutral" music, which was not supposed to elicit a response. Before listening, the participants were given either naltrexone or a placebo, and the researchers measured the participants' reactions as they listened to the music. One week later, the participants returned to repeat the experiment, but this time were given the opposite treatment (for example, the placebo if they initially received naltrexone), according to the study.

The participants' responses to the music were measured in several ways. For example, facial-muscle activity was measured to see if participants were smiling or frowning while listening to the music. Physiological factors such as heart rate and breathing rate were also measured, and the participants took surveys to evaluate their emotional responses. While listening to the music, the participants were able to subjectively rate the song between 0 (no pleasure) and 10 (a lot of pleasure).

The researchers found that when the participants were given naltrexone, their emotional reactions — such as facial movements (both frowning and smiling) — decreased when listening to all of the music. The listeners' subjective reactions to the music, however, changed only when they were listening to their chosen songs, not the neutral music, the researchers found. This finding was not surprising, as the neutral music was not intended to elicit much pleasure (or displeasure) in the first place, the researchers wrote. [4 Unusual Ways Music Can Tune Up the Brain]

"The findings, themselves, were what we hypothesized," Levitin said. "But the anecdotes — the impressions our participants shared with us after the experiment — were fascinating." For example, one participant, after taking naltrexone, told a researcher, "I know this is my favorite song, but it doesn't feel like it usually does," Levitin said. Another participant described a song as sounding pretty, "but it's not doing anything for me," he said.

The researchers noted that because the study was small, more research is needed before the results can be applied to a general population.

In addition, in the experiment, the researchers blocked only one part of the reward system in the brain, they said. Future studies should look at how the opioid system interacts with dopamine in the brain while listening to music, they wrote.   

Originally published on Live Science.

There's a good chance that there's a song that is particularly meaningful to you, and a new small study from Switzerland may explain what makes things we experience, including music, meaningful.

In the study, researchers asked people to take the drug lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, and then were able to pinpoint how people's brains ascribed meaning to specific factors, such as songs, in their environment.

It turns out that this connection to meaning may involve certain areas of the brain that previous research has tied to how people experience their sense of self, the researchers said.

The new findings show which cells, chemicals and regions in the brain "are involved when we perceive our environment as meaningful and relevant," study co-author Katrin Preller, a psychology and neuroscience researcher at the Zürich University Hospital for Psychiatry in Switzerland, said in a statement. [10 Things You Didn't Know About You]

"This is important to understand, since it can reveal potential targets for the treatment of psychiatric illnesses," Preller told Live Science.

Previous research has shown that taking LSD alters how a person ascribes meaning to his or her environment, Preller said. But it wasn't clear what chemicals or parts of the brain were involved in these changes, she said.

In the new study, the researchers performed a series of three brain scans on 22 people. For each scan, the participants were given a placebo, LSD or LSD plus a drug called ketanserin, which blocks some of LSD's effects on the brain. During the brain scans, the people in the study listened to some songs that had a special meaning to them, and others that were not particularly meaningful to them.

The researchers found that songs that were normally meaningless to the listeners became meaningful when the people listened to them under the influence of LSD. However, that effect was diminished when the people had taken LSD along with ketanserin, according to the study, published Jan. 26 in the journal Current Biology.

The brain scans showed that this change — from meaningless to meaningful — appeared to be induced by LSD acting on certain receptors and structures in the brain, according to the study. These receptors and structures have previously been linked to how people experience a sense of self, the researchers said.

These receptors may be potential targets for the treatment of people who have psychiatric disorders that alter the way they attribute meaning to their environment, Preller said. One example of such a disorder is psychosis, which involves losing touch with reality.

In addition to unveiling potential drug treatments, the new findings suggest that hallucinogenic drugs may have therapeutic potential on their own, Adam Halberstadt, an assistant adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego who was not involved in the study, wrote in a unpublished editorial.

For example, two studies published in 2016 showed that a single dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, which is found in "magic" mushrooms, might help to reduce anxiety and depression in people with cancer, Halberstadt wrote in the editorial. [11 Odd Facts About ‘Magic’ Mushrooms]

Both psilocybin and LSD are known to provoke mystical experiences, Halberstadt wrote.

"The ability of hallucinogens to increase perceived meaningfulness and personal relevance could be one factor contributing to mystical experiences as well as to the beneficial therapeutic outcome," he wrote. "Patients who believe that death has profundity and meaning are more likely to peacefully accept the prospect of their impending death."

Originally published on Live Science.

Ever notice any similarities between the songs that get stuck in your head? Turns out, there's science behind why certain songs repeat in our brains, while others fade away.

Songs that are more likely to become "earworms," as these songs are sometimes called, are typically faster paced, and have "a common melodic shape and unusual intervals or repetitions," lead study author Kelly Jakubowski, a research assistant in the department of music at Durham University in England, said in a statement. 

For examples, those "unusual intervals or repetitions" can be heard in the opening riff of "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple or in the chorus of "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga, Jakubowski said. She worked on the study while she was a psychology teaching fellow at Goldsmiths University of London. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

In the study, the researchers looked at the responses of 3,000 people who had filled out an online survey called "The Earwormery" between 2010 and 2013. The survey asked people to name the song that had most recently been stuck in their head, and the song that was most frequently stuck in their head, according to the study, published today (Nov. 3) in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.

Among the top tunes that people listed as earworms were "Bad Romance" and "Can't Get You Out of My Head" by Kylie Minogue, the researchers found.

Once the researchers had a list of common earworms, they compared these tunes with other songs that, though they reached similar levels of popularity and were released around the same time, had never been deemed earworms.

Earworms, it turned out, were more likely to have certain features than the songs that didn't get stuck in people's heads, the researchers found.

One characteristic of an earworm was a common melodic shape found in Western pop music, in which the first phrase of the song rises in pitch and the second phrase falls in pitch, as in the first two lines of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." The researchers noted that the opening riff of "Moves Like Jagger" by Maroon 5, which ranked as the fifth most common earworm, follows this pattern.

The second characteristic of earworms was that they either had unusual intervals, with "unexpected leaps" in the song's timing, or more repeated notes than a person might expect to hear. The instrumental interlude of "My Sharona" by the Knack has one such unusual interval, according to the researchers.

To get a song out of your head, the researchers offered several tips. For example, listening to the song all the way through may help banish an earworm, Jakubowski said. Listening to or thinking about another song may also help, she said. Finally, Jakubowski said she recommends trying to not think about the earworm and letting it fade away naturally on its own.

Those tips may be helpful to keep in mind after reading this list of songs that the survey participants named as the most frequent earworms:

• "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga
• "Can't Get You Out of My Head" by Kylie Minogue
• "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey
• "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Gotye
• "Moves Like Jagger" by Maroon 5
• "California Gurls" by Katy Perry
• "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen
• "Alejandro" by Lady Gaga
• "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga

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Originally published on Live Science.

When researchers recently unveiled the first pop song composed by an artificial intelligence (AI) system, some creative types may have been nervous about the idea of robots taking over their jobs. But how exactly was AI used to write a song?

A team from the Sony CSL Research Lab used a system called Flow Machines to compose the new record, titled "Daddy's Car."

The song sounds like a lost Beatles track from the late 1960s, or perhaps a composition by Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. François Pachet, the project's lead researcher, told Live Science that the song wasn't created by an AI entirely from scratch, so composers can breathe easy — at least for now. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

The song's lyrics, surreal as they sound, were written by a human, French composer Benoît Carré. The team also put together a second track, called "Mr. Shadow," designed to incorporate the styles of Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Cole Porter.

The parts that were written by the computer are known as the "lead sheet," which defines the song's melody, part of the orchestration and part of the mix (which ordinarily audio engineers would then complete). The user, in this case Carré, first chose a style of orchestration. A piece of software called Flow Composer used a database of 13,000 lead sheets to map the style to the lead sheet — that is, take the melody and make it fit the style of music.

"The user has to select the orchestration style from a palette of styles — actually styles here, are human recordings of existing single songs. For instance, a Brazilian guitarist has recorded 'Girl from Ipanema,' [and] we can select this recording, and it is mapped onto the lead sheet," Pachet told Live Science in an email.

The software can then fit the style of the base song — for example, an old Beatles track — to the melody. "If there are chords in the lead sheets that were not played in the audio, the system can still use chord substitutions and audio transformations so that it still 'fits,'" Pachet said. What this means is the artificial intelligence can substitute in music if the specific chords weren't in the song used as a base — the Beatles in this example  

Final choices are still left up to the user — for example if the user doesn't like the accompaniments that the AI came up with — but Pachet said in the future, these decisions could be automated as the researchers build a bigger database of which accompaniments "work" better with certain types of melodies. The machines could be taught this, via a kind of reinforcement learning; greater weights would be assigned to the "right" kinds of answers, and eventually an AI could learn what choices sound better to human ears.

Still, there are things that the system does not do well, Pachet said. "The hard part is now high-level 'structure,' or what I call "sense of direction" — i.e., the capacity to establish long-term correlations between elements of the piece (sequence). That is the thing we (and others) are working on currently," he said.

Teaching an AI the "global timbre" of a song is also difficult, Pachet said. A human can say "this song sounds like X," but computers are not good at that kind of holistic thinking, he said.

Lyrics, as it happens, could be written by machine, he added, but the technology isn't yet integrated into Flow Machine.

That said, the individual pieces that will give AI the ability to compose might come together in the future, he added. "Basically, all the basic ingredients are out there, and the trick is to put the pieces together," Pachet said.

Original article on Live Science.

The first-ever computer-generated music, recorded in the labs of computer pioneer Alan Turing in 1951, has been restored, according to The British Library.

A BBC unit in Manchester, England, made the recording using a primitive computer that filled much of the ground floor of Turing's Computing Machine Laboratory. The computer no longer exists, but the 12-inch single-sided acetate disc, cut by the BBC's technician while the computer played, remains. The record disc captured three songs: "God Save the King," "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" and Glenn Miller's famous swing melody "In the Mood."

Though Turing is best known for breaking the German Enigma code during World War II and is credited as one of the fathers of computing, this recording reveals he was also a musical innovator. [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]

"Alan Turing's pioneering work, in the late 1940s, on transforming the computer into a musical instrument has largely been overlooked: it's an urban myth of the music world that the first computer-generated musical notes were heard in 1957, at Bell Labs in America," researchers at the University of Canterbury wrote in a blog post for The British Library.

The old computer was designed with special instructions for a loudspeaker, which Turing called the "hooter," to emit a short pulse of sound. By repeating the instruction over and over, Turing realized the tick and click sounds formed one steady note. In different repeating patterns, different notes were produced. According to the researchers, Turing had no interest in pursuing the musical application of the computer. Instead, he used the musical notes as indications of the computer's work — a note to signify "job finished," or "error" and so on.

However, after reading Turing's handbook on computer programming, Christopher Strachey — a schoolteacher and pianist with an interest in computing — had an idea for how to use the computer to program musical notes. 

"I sat in front of this enormous machine," Strachey recounted in an interviewwith Nancy Foy for Computing Europe in 1974, "with four or five rows of 20 switches and things, in a room that felt like the control room of a battleship."

The all-night programming session worked: The computer hooted out the British national anthem, and later resulted in a job offer for Strachey to join the lab, according to the researchers. The BBC recording was made later that same year, and Strachey would go on to become one of Britain's top computer scientists.

When the recording was uncovered and played, it was off pitch at first, the University of Canterbury researchers said. However, with some restoration work drawing from the same Turing handbook that allowed Strachey to program the music, the researchers were able to bring back the true sound of the old computer.

"It was a beautiful moment when we first heard the true sound of Turing's computer," the researchers wrote.

The 2-minute restored recording can be heard on The British Library's website.

Original article on Live Science.

Despite spending countless hours of her PhD at Stanford making visits to remote stretches of Alaska, poring over yellow cedar measurements and photos and ultimately publishing her findings, Lauren Oakes was about to experience her data in a new way.

Driving for a weekend trip to the Sierras, she turned the volume way up in her car and hit play. A cascading piano was joined by a flute, cello and other instruments. As the piece continued, the piano's high staccato notes gave way to lower, more intermittent ones before ending on a wave of strings, leaving a sense of another movement yet to be written.

Oakes had just heard the sound of climate change in Alaska's yellow cedar forests and the ways it's already altered the landscape. It wasn't just a composer's impression of her research, though. She had just heard her data — data meticulously collected and pored over for years — translated from numbers and charts into music.

"To hear the patterns it took me years to understand was incredible," she said.

These Paintings Turn Climate Data Into Art What Climate Change Sounds Like from Amazon to Arctic One Glorious Map Shows the Future of Animal Migrations

The piece has the potential to change how researchers and the public engage with data. Music based on data has the potential to reveal new patterns to scientists and get data out of the arcane language of empirical orthogonal functions, p-values and Kruskal-Wallis tests and into a language that everyone can understand.

The research Oakes had just heard came courtesy of Nik Sawe, a fellow Stanford PhD student at the time the music was created and a current researcher there. He had emailed a group of fellow students at the university hoping to find some data to turn into music after going to a talk about using a technique called data sonification to make music from seizure data.

"When you look at the readout that a doctor could analyze, it looked like noise," he said. "But when you hear the stuff with one speaker playing a healthy brain and one playing an afflicted one, you can hear the difference with this structured noise."

If it worked for medical data, Sawe thought it could work for environmental data as well. He had written a computer program that essentially reads data as sheet music, much like a player piano.

And Oakes' work presented a compelling piece. There were multiple types of trees in the forest and a clear progression as climate change is killing off yellow cedars. Rising temperatures are decimating snowpack, but when still frequent cold snaps hit, there's not enough insulation to protect the cedar's shallow roots so they die.

It's an odd scenario — death by freezing in a warming world — but one that could have profound impacts on one of the most culturally and economically important trees in Alaska as it dies out and other, less valuable trees take its place.

"Culturally, they've been used for about 9,000 years in carvings," Oakes, now a lecturer at Stanford, said. "From an economic standpoint, they are the most valuable conifer in Alaska. Even though right now they comprise a lower percentage of the forest in terms of density, when there is a sale for timber in Alaska, they tend to drive it."

That's why Sawe picked up Oakes' data and turned it into tunes. Though a computer played the music, Sawe helped arrange the piece so it made sense. He assigned different trees to different instruments based on their role in the forest (though in the case of sitka spruce, he assigned it to the cello because it's a common wood used in cello construction) and a key so all the players were on the same page (in this case, a rather foreboding D minor).

Each note in the piece is a single tree from one of Oakes' study sites while its pitch conveys the age and loudness conveys its size. All the parts are played by a computer using a Musical Instrument Digital Interface, known more frequently by its less wonky acronym MIDI.

Together, the piece conveys a forest in flux. Sawe also isolated the piano as a solo piece to highlight what’s happening to yellow cedars in particular. In that context, the lively tinkle of notes reminiscent of Philip Glass slips into a dirge by the end as gaps of silence and single notes dominate the piece.

Sawe isn't a composer by trade — he studies how why we make decisions on the environment using a mix of neurology and economics — but he is someone who wants to take complex data and make it understandable.

"With data sonification, you can handle a lot more dimensions if you're listening to data than looking at it," he said. "It's useful for scientists on the one hand but on the other hand, the fact that you can take something like the data from 2,000 trees in Alaska and give someone a 20-second description of what that song is portraying and they pick it up (means) it has huge potential to share these narratives with people."

For Oakes, that's exactly what she was hoping for when she responded back to Sawe's initial email. She wanted her data to be so compelling that people would have to stop and pay attention to it.

The early feedback indicates the project has already realized some of that potential. The California Academy of Science has reached out to them about a public event and Stanford has expressed interest in having a chamber music group do a live performance of the piece. And Sawe has started working with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to explore some of their Pacific Ocean data for another data sonification project down the road that could add another song to the soundtrack of climate change.

While data sonification is still far from the mainstream scientific process, music could be a lynch pin for taking climate research out of the pages of academic journals and into our lives. And it may serve as a reminder that we're all composers and our choices will define what the next movement sounds like.

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Originally published on  Climate Central.

That scary, ominous music that plays whenever sharks are featured on nature documentaries is taking a big toll: It's making people feel unjustly terrified of sharks, and these negative feelings are likely hindering efforts to save and protect the magnificent fish, a new study finds.

Researchers showed 2,100 people a 60-second video clip of sharks that was either silent or set to ominous or uplifting music. People who watched the "frightening" music clip tended to rate sharks more negatively compared with people who watched the video with uplifting music or silence, they found.

This finding is concerning, as most people view documentaries as educational, and may not be aware that these so-called objective shows are actually eroding their feelings toward sharks, said study lead researcher Andrew Nosal, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Saint Katherine College in San Marcos, California, and a visiting assistant researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.  [7 Unanswered Questions About Sharks]

"While it may be tempting to feature sharks with ominous background music to maximize the entertainment aspect of documentaries, news packages or even live exhibits, this may also undermine their educational value by biasing viewers' perceptions of sharks," Nosal told Live Science in an email.   

It's no surprise that background music can influence people's feelings. Music can set the mood, engage the viewer emotionally and convey unspoken commentary and judgment, Nosal said. However, he decided to look into the matter more after noticing that music accompanying sharks was often "ominous and unsettling, à la [the movie] 'Jaws,'" compared with the majestic, often playful music that accompanies other animals, such as dolphins, he said.

The findings will hopefully make filmmakers think twice before pairing shark footage with menacing music in the future, Nosal said. Especially because, in the long run, negative perceptions of sharks may hurt conservation efforts that rely on public support, he said.

The study is "extremely well done," said Robert Hueter, the director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, who was not involved with the study. 

"People might consider this to have been a no-brainer, but in fact no one had ever taken the time to do this systematically and scientifically," Hueter said.

Hueter added that he's given countless interviews on sharks for news outlets over the years, and it's not uncommon for newscasters to play ominous music during the segment, and the music unfortunately "reinforces people's perceptions of sharks as being dangerous killers," he said.

The study was published online today (Aug. 3) in the journal PLOS ONE.

Original article on Live Science.

An event combining virtual reality and live musical performance aims to bring together a 20-piece orchestra, a 100-person choir and breathtaking views of the cosmos captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

And it's going to be available to the public for free.

"The Hubble Cantata"will premiere in Brooklyn, New York, on Aug. 6 at the Prospect Park Bandshell, as part of the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. Up to 6,000 people will be able to experience an installation featuring 360-degree sound delivered by live musicians and vocalists, including two opera soloists. [Spaced Out! 101 Astronomy Images That Will Blow Your Mind]

And accompanying the musical presentation will be a unique visual event that will transport listeners into a sight that is literally out of this world.

Immersive animations

As audience members don cardboard headsets and activate a free app, immersive VR animations created from actual Hubble photos will transform Prospect Park into a display of celestial objects. The 5-minute-long VR film, titled "Fistful of Stars," will offer viewers the perspective of actually traveling through space.

A concentric array of eight speakers surrounding the audience will enable the concert audio to travel around and through them in 3D space, according to the event's acoustics researcher and designer, Terence Caulkins.

The installation represents a collaboration among artists, engineers and scientists, developed at the New Museum in New York City as part of its art incubation program, New Inc.

The musical commission originated with the concept of accompanying Hubble imagery and collaborating with Mario Livio, an astrophysicist who worked with Hubble for 24 years, "Hubble Cantata" composer Paola Prestini told Live Science in an email.

Since Hubble launched on April 24, 1990 — the first optical telescope deployed in space — it has made more than 1 million observations while orbiting Earth at approximately 17,000 mph (27,359 km/h), capturing distant supernovas, unprecedented views of objects within our solar system, and galaxies that are at least 13 billion years old, to name just a few.

The brightest spot in Orion's sword

But some of Hubble's most awe-inspiring photos are of nebulas — ancient clouds of dust and gas — that can be the remains of a dead, exploded star, or nurseries where new stars are born. An estimated 10,000 nebulas lurk in the Milky Way, and they represent a wide range of sizes and shapes. Many carry names inspired by those shapes, such as the Eagle Nebula, the Horsehead Nebula, the Ring Nebula and Thor's Helmet Nebula. [See some of the Hubble Space Telescope's most iconic photos]

The Orion Nebula, located 15,000 light-years from Earth and the brightest point in the Orion constellation, is the main attraction in "Fistful of Stars."

Filmmaker and VR director Eliza McNitt told Live Science in an email that she selected the Orion Nebula for the VR experience "because it is a nursery for star birth and reflected the themes of 'The Hubble Cantata,' which tells the story of the birth, life and death of stars and the human connection to the cosmos."

As the cantata unfolds, Orion emerges as a character, one that was "intimately connected to the narrative," McNitt said.

But at the end of the day, "Hubble Cantata" is about people, Prestini told Live Science, calling the installation "less a story about space and more a human story." McNitt agreed, adding that the installation represents our connection to the cosmos, and that the VR experience "explores the parallels between human life on Earth and stars in the heavens."

A Kickstarter campaign for "Hubble Cantata" launched on July 13, to help raise money to take the production on tour throughout the country. Following its debut on Aug. 6, the VR film "Fistful of Stars" will be available to download and view for free on the creators' dedicated app, "giving anyone the opportunity to experience the cosmos," according to the project's Kickstarter statement.

Original article on Live Science.

Beyoncé hasn't revealed what inspired her to create "Lemonade," a musical album and film that details the emotions felt after learning of a husband's infidelity. But regardless of whether the album is autobiographical, partly true or totally fictional, it largely mirrors what really happens to betrayed partners, experts said.

"She's speaking a language that so many people have experienced," said Kassia Wosick, a research affiliate at New Mexico State University and an assistant professor of sociology at El Camino College in Torrance, California.

In fact, "Lemonade" may show people that "how we move through infidelity is painful, but it's also very strengthening, and there is an afterward," Wosick told Live Science. [How Do I Love Thee? Experts Count 8 Ways]

The 12 phases of "Lemonade" show how Beyoncé handled (or imagined to handle) infidelity, including: intuition, denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, loss, accountability, reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, hope and redemption.

Not everyone experiences all of these stages, and some go through them in a different order, said Wosick, who works with couples dealing with infidelity.

Here's a scientific look at the different phases Beyoncé, who conveyed part of the message with the adapted poetry of Warsan Shire, describes in her musical journey.

Intuition, denial, anger

In "Intuition," Beyoncé asks, "Where do you go when you go quiet? What are you hiding?" Her intuition tells her that something is wrong, and she sings about how she prays to catch him whispering, and "I pray you catch me listening."

Many affairs are discovered because of careless clues and intuition, Wosick said. People may start questioning themselves, wondering, "Is this really happening?" she said. They may also question the partner, saying, "I feel like something is going on." [8 Myths That Could Kill Your Relationship]

Denial may follow, with some people thinking, "My partner would never do that to me." They may also deny that they were victimized, and instead blame themselves for their partner's transgression.

Beyoncé's denial has hint at this self-blame. "I tried to change," she says in the album. "Tried to close my mouth more. Tried to be soft, prettier. Less awake."

But her anger is quick to follow.

"I am the dragon breathing fire," she sings. "Beautiful mane I'm the lion. Beautiful man I know you're lying. I am not broken, I'm not crying, I'm not crying. You ain't trying hard enough. You ain't loving hard enough. You don't love me deep enough."

Beyoncé really owns her anger, but anger is usually a frustrating stage, especially for women, Wosick said. Typically, this stage involves self-anger, self-doubt and anger directed toward the cheating partner. Some people suppress or dismiss their anger, instead blaming other factors, such as problems within the relationship (thinking "maybe I deserved it") or the adage, "that's just how men are," she said.

Anger is complicated because, at least in American society, "We're not supposed to be angry at our partners, in general," Wosick said. "[People think] that denotes an unhealthy relationship." This may explain why some wronged partners move through the anger stage quickly, and others avoid it altogether, she said.

Apathy, emptiness, loss

Beyoncé sings, "I ain't sorry. I ain't thinking about you," showing her apathy, as tennis star Serena Williams dances next to her. But despite its place in "Lemonade," apathy isn't a common stage of dealing with infidelity, Wosick said.

"There is this sort of dismissiveness that comes into play where you start to shore up your barriers a little bit," Wosick said. "[But] it's a little bit more helplessness than apathy."

Beyoncé's apathy is followed by emptiness and loss, with her singing, "come back." But these two stages can often be switched.

"You might feel that loss and then move to emptiness afterward, where you say, 'I feel so betrayed. That trust truly is gone,'" Wosick said. "That emptiness might play out in terms of 'Where do I go from here? I'm not used to feeling so out of love or so disconnected from my partner.'"

Accountability, reformation, forgiveness

Beyoncé decides to make the cheater accountable, detailing, in general, some men's unjust behaviors toward their wives.

"Did he bend your reflection? Did he make you forget your own name? Did he convince you he was a god?" she asks in the album. "Are you a slave to the back of his head?"

Accountability is "huge," Wosick said. "It's choosing to acknowledge your own actions and taking responsibility."

All three of these — accountability, reformation and forgiveness — are part of the rebuilding process, she said. But some people don't reach them, she said. With loss, the betrayed partner may feel as if he or she can never fully trust another person again. But if the perpetrator admits his or her wrongs and acknowledges how the betrayal affected the partner (a stage that doesn't always happen, Wosick said), that can set the stage for reformation.

In the film, Beyoncé walks through water, saying, "He bathes me until I forget their names and faces." This water scene is no mistake, as water is often a symbol of rebirth and renewal. "It's this way of acknowledging, cleanse me, bathe me, can you [help me] spring forth from this loss," Wosick said.

During this time, couples can reset their expectations, boundaries and love for one another. Reformation is like a reset button, a stage when partners can begin to rebuild their trust in each other, Wosick said. [6 Scientific Tips for a Successful Marriage]

However, forgiveness is needed to get there. This includes self-forgiveness (in case the betrayed partner blames himself or herself for causing the infidelity), as well as forgiving the partner.

"Sometimes people can't do both," Wosick said. "And sometimes it takes a really long time."

Forgiveness is not dismissing or forgetting about the betrayal. It's also not punishing the perpetrator forever, which can be difficult because "we live in a very eye-for-an-eye society," she said. Instead, it involves acknowledging what happened, and moving on, she said.

Or, as Beyoncé says, "If we're gonna heal, let it be glorious."

Resurrection, hope and redemption

As the album nears its end, Beyoncé talks about reconnecting with her husband, and finding hope in their child, Blue Ivy Carter. [6 Scientific Tips for a Successful Marriage]

"You’re the magician," Beyoncé says. "Pull me back together again, the way you cut me in half. Make the woman in doubt disappear."

For the couples Wosick has worked with, resurrection signifies the next step — "That you're not trapped by the situation," she said. "You're not so consumed by what's happened, and also by how to fix it. You're starting to come into your own again."

Resurrection can lead to hope, which can make people stronger than they were before, she said. For some, it means, "I'm clearer than I was before about who I am, what my boundaries are [and] what my relationship needs to be for me," Wosick said.

Redemption, like accountability, shows a high level of awareness for one's sins, she added.

"Redemption is a powerful stage that a lot of people won't allow themselves to get into," Wosick said. "It really involves acknowledging what you've done wrong, and the people it impacted in your life."

For anybody going through a betrayal, Wosick offered some wise advice.

"This is definitely a tough time. But it is just that: A time. A period of time that you will eventually move through and beyond. And you will undoubtedly be stronger, wiser and hopefully more agentic when you finally do so."

Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Jazz-playing computers and robots could soon yield clues about how to help people collaborate with machines, researchers say.

The new project, called MUSICA (short for Musical Improvising Collaborative Agent), aims to develop a musical device that can improvise a jazz solo in response to human partners, just as real jazz musicians improvise alongside one another.

MUSICA is part of a new program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. military responsible for developing new technologies. The project is designed to explore new ways that people can interact with computers and robots. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

"There is definitely a desire for more natural kinds of communications with computational systems as they grow in their ability to be intelligent," Ben Grosser, an assistant professor of new media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science. "A lot of us are familiar with various methods of interacting with computers, such as text-based and touch-based interfaces, but language-based interfaces such as Siri or Google Now are extremely limited in their capabilities."

Grosser and his colleague Kelland Thomas, an associate professor of music at the University of Arizona, are developing MUSICA to explore how people can communicate with one another without language. "That could make interactions between humans and machines a lot deeper," said Grosser, who himself is a jazz trumpeter. "When it comes to jazz, you feel the music as much as you hear and think about it — you react instinctively to things that are going on."

To develop a machine capable of playing improvisational jazz, the researchers will create a database of jazz solos from a variety of musicians and have computers analyze the recordings to figure out the various processes that come into play when a musician improvises. The researchers will then develop a performance system to analyze the components of human jazz performances, including the beat, pitch, harmony and rhythm. The system will also consider what it has learned about jazz solos to communicate and respond musically in real time.

"Our goal is to by next summer present a 'call and answer' system to DARPA, where I can play a line of music, and the system will analyze that line and give an answer as close to real time as possible," Grosser said.

The researchers admit the project may seem unusual.

"Let's face it — trying to develop a system that can play jazz is a crazy idea," Grosser said. "It's not going to be Miles Davis. I think if we can make this thing play like a high schooler, we'll really have done our job."

Ultimately, Grosser hoped this research could shed light on the nature of the creative process. "By finding the limits of computational creativity, we can get a different understanding of human creativity, on our own creative processes," Grosser said.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called music "the universal language of mankind." Now researchers may know why.

A new analysis of music from diverse cultures around the globe reveals that regardless of whether it's hip-hop or classical or alternative rock, all music shares certain universal features, such as having a simple beat. And these characteristics tend to be those that bring people together, the researchers said.

"Our findings help explain why humans make music," study researcher Thomas Currie from the University of Exeter said in a statement. "The results show that the most common features seen in music around the world relate to things that allow people to coordinate their actions, and suggest that the main function of music is to bring people together and bond social groups — it can be a kind of social glue."

Currie, along with Pat Savage, a doctoral student at the Tokyo University of the Arts, and their colleagues analyzed music from around the world, examining 304 recordings from the online Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. The music samples came from every inhabited continent, from both vocal and instrumental music, and included indigenous recordings as well as modern, studio-created music. [15 Weird Things Humans Do Every Day, and Why]

The researchers analyzed the music using a few different classification schemes. They systematically coded the features of each piece of music and employed a phylogenetic comparison system similar to those used by evolutionary biologists to classify and statistically analyze organisms. Although they found no features that were part of all the songs analyzed,  the researchers did find dozens of characteristics that were present in a majority of songs across different world regions.

Some of these characteristics were not surprising, such as the music's tendency to use discrete pitches (rather than ones that slide from one tone to the next like the way a voice rises to ask a question), and equally timed beats and short musical phrases.

Other music universals were more unexpected, like the discovery that two-beat rhythms predominate over three-beat rhythms (think of a military march compared with a waltz). "It fits that we have two legs, so the music is probably related to the natural rhythms of movement," said Savage. "And also, two is simpler than three, so maybe it's easier to process and coordinate."

The researchers also found that though a pentatonic or five-note scale is assumed to reign supreme around the world, scales are actually more complicated than that. A lot of the scales that were analyzed actually had four or six notes, though the interval structures were similar to each other. (A scale is a set of musical notes ordered by fundamental frequency or pitch.)

Men as well as bands dominate music around the world, from Papua New Guinea to the Middle East. Some people, as far back as Darwin, have believed that singing evolved as a way for males to gain mates (whale song and bird song are dominated by males). In humans, Savage said, the fact that females are less likely to be involved in music-making is likely more tied into a patriarchal cultural structure than a biological reason — something that he said requires more study.

The finding that most music happens in groups, however, points to the evolution of group bonding and social cohesion through music. Before iPods and smartphones (and before that, CDs and records), multiple people were required to bring music to life; simple repetitive beats brought people together to collaborate on one activity.

Previous studies showed that people who experience music together are more likely to rate those who listen with them as helpful or attractive. Even babies, though too young to talk, are more likely to help an experimenter after bouncing in rhythm with him or her than when they move out of sync.

Savage said that follow-up studies might compare music production across species, analyzing which features are unique to human music and which exist in birds or whales or other music-making creatures.

The research was published yesterday (June 29) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Naomi Eide is a master's student in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. She contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Denny Gulick began playing piano at age 4. With perfect pitch and a knack for memorization, he was a natural. 

When Gulick was 5, his father gave him math multiplication tables that extended up to 16, and taught him pi to 15 decimal places, something Gulick has never forgotten. His mind seemed equally adapted to music and math, a perfect harmony — though one did not necessarily influence the other. For the past 50 years, Gulick has been a math professor at the University of Maryland, and he has found many correlations between math and classical music. 

"The connection is that — to my way of thinking, and I have thought about this for decades — there are patterns [in music], especially with Johann Sebastian Bach," Gulick said. "There are a lot of patterns, and mathematics has a lot of patterns. … In fact, mathematics is really about patterns."

Does music help math, or does math help music?

Musicians and scientists alike have attempted to find whether a person's musical talents benefit other aspects of that individual's life, such as the ability to focus. Though scientists have not precisely determined how, or if, music education and performance give a person increased skills in areas like math and science, researchers do know that musicians have some increased cognitive abilities. 

"If you play a musical instrument, your brain shows changes," mainly in the motor and auditory cortices, said Nadine Gaab, the principal investigator at the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children's Hospital. "Auditory, because you're using your ears a lot … and then motor because you're doing a lot of practice with your fingers and arms" requiring unique movements, Gaab said. 

"It is unclear, to this stage, whether musicians have that because they are born with [it] and they are just really good with listening and doing certain finger movements and that's why there drawn to music," Gaab said. "Or it's the other way around, and music actually changes the brain? We don't know that yet." [Abstract Reasoning Enhanced by Music Study]

Robert Slevc, assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of Maryland, said that the correlations found between musical and mathematical abilities could come from many different factors, as studies are not created in a vacuum and other variables could influence the outcome. 

"I think you could say there's evidence for relationships between musical experience, ability or interest, and various kinds of cognitive and social domains," Slevc said. "What those [relationships] mean, I think we don't yet know. 

Slevc said that the association between performing music and having mathematical skills could mean, simply, "that smart people are good at things." 

There are a lot of aspects of music that can be expressed mathematically, but musicians do not sit through a piece of music calculating its mathematical nuances or interval frequencies, Slevc said. Though a performer may understand intervals and time measurements in music, it does not mean he or she is automatically good at math, he said. 

Similarly, while the laws of physics govern how a ball travels through the air, playing baseball doesn't make a person a scientist, Slevc said. 

"We're all good at catching things, too, in ways that are quite complicated, but that doesn't necessarily make us good at physics," he said. 

And yet, the differences are clear

Studies also have shown that children and adults with musical training have heightened skills in an area called executive functioning, Gaab said. 

This involves the mental processes that allow brains to plan, focus attention, remember instruction and successfully juggle multiple tasks, according to the Center of the Developing Child at Harvard University.

Musicians are particularly good "at switching tasks quickly and switching rules quickly," said Gaab. However, this is another example of tricky correlation, as Gaab said there are no studies that look at executive functioning over time, determining whether such skills influence someone to become a musician, or whether music changes and enhances a person's executive functioning skills. 

"Anytime you learn a new skill, that skill is represented in your brain in some way and can show up functionally, but can also show up structurally," Slevc said. 

Areas of the brain can show a person's aptitude for certain skills, allowing scientists to physically observe a person's traits rather than just make psychological observations. These areas include grey matter, which comprises regions of the brain involved with muscle control, memory, emotions, speech and senses.

Grey matter densities can show the instrument that a person plays, Slevc said. Violinists tend to have more grey matter density devoted to their left hands, while pianists have density bilaterally, Slevc said, with professionals having higher densities than amateurs. To qualify the findings concerning grey-matter density, Slevc added that some skilled typists might have similar grey-matter distributions as a pianist. 

Though scientists do not know whether executive functioning skills influence someone to become a musician, some conclude that music education allows for increased cognitive performance. 

Anita Collins, a professor at the University of Canberra specializing in neuroscience and music, said that music education makes any human being operate more effectively from a cognitive perspective, which means "the brains of musicians can learn faster, excel at more complex topics and think creatively about problems." Collins emphasized that musicians are more perceptive than others when they are listening to classical music, observing the nuances and intricacies involved with the repertoire. (You can see a TEDEd talk with Collins for more on the subject.)

"They process the music into understanding just like a nonmusician," said Collins. "But music education helps to refine that skill, [giving] descriptions and words to what we are hearing."

Though there might be a scientific explanation connecting music and one's neurological abilities, the true impact and results of having musical training is left for the musicians to decide. For some, like Drew Baden, the chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland and a practicing pianist, music goes right to the brain and stimulates emotions, allowing people to feel the same things. 

"Music is a great thing to connect science and psychology," Baden said. It connects "what it means to be alive, to be self aware and all alone in your skin."

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

How much would you spend on a few strands of a dead man's hair? How about $15,000? That's how much you'll have to shell out if you want to take home a bit of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's mane.

The 18th century composer's blond locks hit the auction block Thursday (May 28) at Sotheby's auction house in London, where they're expected to fetch between $14,800 and $17,800 (10,000 - 12,000  pounds). Also for sale: a few of Ludwig van Beethoven's gray hairs. Beethoven's locks are expected to sell for between $3,000 and $4,500 (2,000 - 3,000 pounds).

These strange, personal artifacts are part of Sotheby's "Music, Continental and Russian Books and Manuscripts" sale, which also features handwritten musical scores and original correspondence of some of the greatest musicians, authors and artists of the 18th century onward. [Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds]

Apart from Mozart and Beethoven's hair, auction attendees can bid on a signed letter from the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to his publisher in London. The auction lot also includes a handwritten letter from Sigmund Freud to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig about his encounter with the young surrealist painter, Salvador Dalí (Freud wasn't impressed).

But the strangest items in the upcoming sale are definitely the ones that used to sit on top of Beethoven and Mozart's heads. Mozart's hair, tied up with a green thread, will be sold inside a gilt locket that also contains a tiny note explaining how the composer's tresses ended up inside a piece of jewelry. John Collet, an English civil engineer, wrote the note. It details how his friend, the conductor Karl Anschütz, gave him the locket sometime between 1848 and 1851.

Anschütz had received the strand of Mozart's hair from his mother who, in turn, was gifted this strange prize by Maria Constanze Mozart (Mozart's widow). In 1890, Collet passed the strands down to his daughter, Edith, who was marrying the English composer Arthur Somervell. The locket containing Mozart's hair has been a Somervell family heirloom ever since.

The story behind Beethoven's hair isn’t as well documented. The gray strands, which are being sold alongside an invitation to Beethoven's funeral, were likely cut from the composer's scalp shortly before (or after) he died in March 1827. Other strands of Beethoven's hair have been previously sold at auction, including one lock that Sotheby's London sold in 1994 to members of the American Beethoven Society for $7,300 (£3,600).

That lock was apparently cut from Beethoven's head as he lay on his deathbed, according to the Beethoven Center at San José State University in California. Other strands of the beloved musician's hair can be found at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the British Library in London and the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Germany.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Bass notes lay down beats in music worldwide, and new research may reveal why that is — the ear responds better to rhythms set by deeper sounds, scientists say.

Although melodies in the foreground of music are often dominated by higher tones, rhythms in the background of music are often made up of by lower tones, such as the bass lines of jazz and blues, the left-hand, low-pitched rhythms of ragtime piano, and the pulses of bass drums in electronic, pop and dance music.

"Music in diverse cultures is composed this way, from classical East Indian music to Gamelan music of Java and Bali, suggesting an innate origin,"said study co-author Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind and a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.

To find out why lower tones might dominate rhythms in music, Trainor and her colleagues had 35 volunteers listen to two simultaneous streams of computer-synthesized piano tones, each of a different pitch. A tenth of the time, the lower tone occurred 50 milliseconds too early; another tenth of a time, the higher tone occurred 50 milliseconds too early.

In one set of experiments, the researchers scanned the brain activity of the volunteers as they listened to these streams of tones, revealing the brains of the participants responded more strongly when the lower tones were off beat. In another set of experiments, the investigators had the volunteers tap their fingers in time with the streams of tones, and they discovered the participants altered their finger tapping to follow changes in timing of the lower tones more often than for the higher tones. [Incredible Technology: How to See Inside the Mind]

These findings suggest people are better at detecting mistakes in a rhythm's timing when they occur with lower tones, which could explain why lower tones dominate musical rhythms. The fact these findings were seen even with the eight volunteers in the experiments who did not have any musical training suggests this discovery may reflect innate aspects of human biology.

"There is a physiological basis for why we create music the way we do," Trainor told Live Science. "Virtually all people will respond more to the beat when it is carried by lower-pitched instruments."

The researchers suggest this effect might originate in the cochlea, the part of the inner ear that sends electrical signals to the brain in response to sound vibrations. Their computer models of the inner ear suggest the cochlea is more sensitive to changes in rhythms that are made up of lower tones.

Previous work by Trainor and her colleagues found that people are better at perceiving the higher-pitched of two simultaneous sounds. This could explain why melodies are commonly conveyed by higher tones, Trainor said.

The findings also suggest that "for some people with poor rhythm, the problems might arise actually in cochlea of the ear," Trainor said. "But at the same time, timing and rhythm are subsequently processed in many different cortical and sub-cortical areas [of the brain], so their problems could be in any of these regions as well."

The researchers do note that higher-pitched sounds can also contribute to rhythms. "Indeed, high-pitched instruments can carry important rhythmic aspects — for example, in jazz, higher-pitched instruments often add rhythmic interest by playing off the beat, so the rhythm is an interaction between different instruments," Trainor said. "What we are saying is that most typically the bass-range instruments lay down the basic beat, and that we are best at perceiving that beat when it is in the lower-pitched instruments."

In the future, the researchers would like to study how early this effect might appear in children. This work suggests this effect originates in the inner ear, meaning it should arise early in development, but there may be contributions from the brain as well "that are more dependent on learning and experience," Trainor said.

Trainor and her colleaguesMichael Hove, Celine Marie and Ian Bruce detailed their findings online today (June 30) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Music shapes the brain in many ways — it can alter brain structures in musicians, and enhance cognitive skills in children and adults alike, research shows. Still, scientists are continuing to learn much about the way the brain responds to music.

Here is a look at four ways that music is known to affect the brain.

Unearthing patients' lost memories

Music has the power to bring back memories, leading some researchers to say that music could be used as a treatment for people with memory problems.

In one recent study, researchers found that music could bring back old-age memories in people who had memory problems after sustaining traumatic brain injuries (TBI).

In fact, the musical treatment, which involved playing hit songs from different periods in people's lives, was better than an interview at eliciting past memories, according to the study published in the journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation in 2013.

Other investigations have found that for people with severe memory problems as a result of Alzheimer's disease or dementia, music can affect the memory when nothing else does. The effect can sometimes be so great that experts have likened it to "awakening" a patient who has been unconscious.

Sharpening emotion-detecting skills

Musical training may turn people into better emotion detectors, some studies have suggested.

In one study published in the European Journal of Neuroscience in 2009, 30 participants watched a subtitled nature film while listening to a very short, almost undetectable clip of a baby's cry. The researchers looked at the brain's electrical waves to measure how sensitive the people were to the sound, and whether their brain's emotional circuits were evoked.

The researchers found that the musicians' brains responded more quickly and accurately than the brains of non-musicians, suggesting the musicians may be better at perceiving emotions even when music isn't being played, the researchers said.

Blocking out the noise

The aging brain normally becomes less and less capable of blocking out background noise, but people with musical training may be better than others at hearing and understanding sounds in a noisy environment as they age.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2013, researchers found that even people who took music lessons only in childhood still showed some long-lasting brain effects when it comes to detecting sounds amid a noisy background.

Noteworthy: Learning language through singing

It might help to practice a new language you're trying to learn by singing the words in the shower. Scientists recently found that when learning a new language, singing the phrases can help people learn the language better, compared with simply reading those phrases.

In the study published in the journal Memory & Cognition in 2014, researchers asked 60 adults to listen and repeat phrases in Hungarian, a language entirely foreign to the participants. Some of the participants were asked to simply repeat the phrases, some were told to repeat the phrases rhythmically, and the rest were asked to repeat the phrases by singing them.

The results showed that the participants who sang did significantly better than others in a series of Hungarian language tests.

Email Bahar Gholipour. Follow us @LiveScience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

(Inside Science) -- When reading a novel, it’s common to let one’s mind wander into the imaginary: What might these characters look or sound like? Now, a new project uses algorithms to translate the emotions conveyed within a text into music that reflects the same sentiments.

TransProse, as the project is called, is a collaboration between Hannah Davis, a New York-based programmer and artist, and Saif Mohammad, a research officer at the National Research Council Canada in Ottawa.

The inspiration for the project came when Davis was in a master’s program for creative communication technology. As a class project, she was translating the grammar of novels into sound.

“Hemingway was really short and staccato,” she said. It led her to wonder how music could tackle a much bigger data set – emotion in novels.

That’s when she found the work of Mohammad, who had created a massive 14,000-word lexicon that associated words with emotions. Ice cream is associated with happiness, while tears linked up with sadness. Together, Mohammad and Davis worked to create an algorithm that could build music based on these associations. They presented their results in a paper at the European Association for Computational Linguistics Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature last month in Sweden.

The musical works they’ve made using the algorithm were inspired by great pieces of literature.  Some of these works, including Joseph Conrad’s novella "Heart of Darkness" (highest emotion: fear; second highest emotion: sadness) and Harper Lee’s novel "To Kill A Mockingbird" (highest emotion: trust; second highest emotion: fear), are interesting and a little weird.

Davis and Mohammad point to the computer-created music based on the the novel "Peter Pan" as one of their favorites.

“It’s a simple little ditty, but it feels like 'Peter Pan,'” said Davis. They note in the paper that there is no one right way to create music from text. “It’s a little artistic,” said Mohammad. “What I like is that when you think about generating music it’s like a story…there are so many choices.”

The algorithm has trouble with complex storylines and allegorical books that have double meanings.

“'1984' and 'Brave New World' are difficult,” said Davis. “Even in 'A Clockwork Orange,' here we have a character going through the world doing terrible things but talking happily about them.”

The challenge of computers parsing real-life texts, where emotions run deeper than happy and sad, is one that will be tackled in the future. The researchers say that natural-language processing still has a long way to go before it hits the mainstream, and this project is just a start.

“The lexicon only tells you what the words are associated with, but a sentence isn’t just the sum of words,” said Saif. “We have these machine-learning algorithms, and [the technology] tries to generalize what it has learned. We’ve done lots of work in the last 10 years on sentiment analysis, but the emotion work is still in its nascence.”

Connecting text and music is no trivial task.

“We have been reading stories for thousands of years, but haven’t made a connection to music in an automatic way,” said Rada Mihalcea, an associate professor of engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She points out that the project is also important in drawing attention to the field, but it has implications for research in terms of connecting emotion analysis in text and music.

In the future, it may be possible to analyze emotions in text to figure out how a group of people is feeling, especially during an emotionally heightened situation like a natural disaster or other emergency. This information could potentially predict how people will react in these situations.

In addition, Mihalcea said understanding emotions could lead to better recommendations for products or services.

“Instead of recommending something based on a person’s gender and age, you could include the feelings a person has towards locations, targets or in a certain moment to create richer user profiles,” she said.

Davis and Mohammad say they’d like to create melodic lines for characters who change throughout the novel, or motifs for certain locations in a book. They may also make a mobile application or even incorporate the technology into an online bookstore.

“Right now you can see the front cover of a book, but what if you could listen to the emotional tone of the book and decide if you want to buy it,” Davis asks.

This story was provided by Inside Science News Service. Katharine Gammon (@kategammon) is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, Calif., and writes for a wide range of magazines covering technology, society, and animal science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

People are very good at moving in time to a beat. When you listen to your favourite song, you will probably find yourself nodding your head or tapping your foot along almost instinctively.

And when you’re doing it in a club, that piles pressure on your DJ. That DJ has to mix two songs together to maintain a common beat between the tracks if they want to keep the audience dancing. If they do a bad job of the mix, the two beat lines from each song won’t blend into each other. The most likely result of such a faux pas would be an instantly empty dance floor.

We’ve been investigating how closely matched two beat lines need to be for people to start moving in time to them as if they form a common beat. In other words, how accurate does a DJ need to be to make a seamless transition between songs?

We asked people to tap their finger in time to two metronomes played simultaneously. The separation between the two metronomes and the consistency (the predictability of the rhythms) was varied across the experiment.

We found that if the metronomes were very consistent, they had to be closely matched in time for them to be considered a common beat. But if the beats of the individual metronomes were inconsistent and less predictable, the separation between the beats could be larger while still being considered to form a single common beat.

Since a DJ will typically play tunes with a strongly defined beat, our research shows that in fact they have a very small margin of error to make the two beat lines sound as one to the dancing crowd.

The skill of DJing is probably more complex than people realise. Many of them might be high profile and living a super-star lifestyle but the professional DJ is an as-yet largely under-researched species. Along with the University of Leeds, we’re now investigating the timing skills of professional DJs who have only received informal training (as is generally the case) and comparing them to formally trained classical musicians.

Mathematical moshing

The models resulting from this research are also being applied to other areas, including crowd movements. In football stadiums the crowd will often become excited and start to bounce up and down together.

When the crowd moves together like this it can create problems with structural vibration so it’s useful to understand how and when a crowd is likely to start moving in synchrony.

The conditions under which this occurs are oddly similar to the beat matching of songs. A crowd moving together has developed a common beat between them. In this case however, rather than just sound, they are also combining vision and touch from the people surrounding them. We are working towards understanding how the brain combines all this conflicting and unreliable sensory information to develop a common beat to which everyone moves.

Information like this can then be used to inform the construction of stadiums and bridges. This should result in better structural designs with less wobble when the crowd get excited.

So next time you scoff at the superstar DJ being paid a fortune to play a few songs, give them a little credit. These results show that we continuously adjust our judgements of events in our environment according to the statistics of the sensory information we get from those events. Making two beats into one, maintaining your audience as you go, is a fine art.

Mark Elliott receives funding from the EPSRC and prior to this, the BBSRC.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google +. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Novels are typically for reading, but a recent study attempted to create an entirely new art form by translating the emotions of the written word into music.

The work could transform the way people interact with literature and spark new ways to visualize information, such as audiovisual e-books that generate music according to the emotions on the page or novel music apps, the researchers said.

"Given a novel in an electronically readable form, our system — called TransProse — generates simple piano pieces whose notes are dependent on the emotion words in the text," said Saif Mohammad, a computer scientist at the National Research Council Canada. [Top 10 Things that Make Humans Special]

Together with Hannah Davis, who created TransProse as her master's thesis at New York University, Mohammad used the software to count the density of words associated with eight basic emotions: anticipation, anger, joy, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise and trust.

Although there have been previous studies that analyzed sentiments or examined the creation of music, TransProse is the first to combine the two, the researchers said. "It is the first system that automatically generates musical pieces based on the emotions in the text, and uses a novel mechanism to determine sequences of notes that capture the emotional activity in text," Mohammad said.

The algorithm uses databases to rate words according to their emotional value, thereby analyzing sentiment in the text and gauging its "emotional temperature."

"For example, whether the key is major or minor is determined by the ratio of positive to negative words across the novel; the main octave is based on the difference between the joy and sadness word densities throughout the text," Davis said.

Conveying the mood

The researchers used TransProse to measure the sentiment changes throughout a book, automatically generating music that reflects specific moods. So far, the scientists have created musical soundtracks for several famous novels, including "Peter Pan" by J.M. Barrie, "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess and "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, among others. The musical pieces are available on the TransProse website.

The algorithm works by splitting the book into four sections: the beginning, early middle, late middle and ending. Then, it generates an emotion profile for each part — a collection of various statistics about the presence of emotional words in the text, Mohammad said. [5 Ways Your Emotions Influence Your World (and Vice Versa)]

But generating music is challenging, the researchers said, because "in composing new music, just as in creating a new story, there are an infinite number of choices and possibilities."

To automate this process, the scientists have come up with a number of rules to determine various elements of music, such as tempo, scale, octave, major or minor key, notes, and the sequence of notes for multiple melodies. These rules are basically "guidelines to make the sequence of notes sound like music as opposed to a cacophonous cascade of sounds," Mohammad said.

The researchers also determined the sequence of notes to be played as they correspond to the changes in density of emotional words in the text.

The resulting compositions consist of a main melody determined by the dominant emotion, accompanied by other melodies generated by other moods throughout the text. "The other two melodies — besides the main one — are based on the top two most prevalent emotions in the novel," Davis said.

Finally, with the help of standard open-source software called JFugue, the sequence of notes is converted into an audio file of piano music.

Musical tweets

The research may improve people's understanding of the elements of music that make it emotional, the scientists said. "Music and literature have an intertwined past. It is believed that they originated together, but in time, the two have developed into separate art forms that continue to influence each other," Mohammad said.

"This work shows that it is possible to automatically translate aspects of literature to music," he added. "We hope that it will lead to further research leading to even more sophisticated systems that automatically generate beautiful and emotionally representative music from text."

Furthermore, there may be other applications beyond the prospect of creating audiovisual e-books that generate music to accentuate the mood on the page, the researchers said.

For instance, pieces of literature could be mapped to musical pieces if the emotions in the text and the piece of music are compatible. Apps could then find and play songs compatible with the mood of the chapter being read.

This type of software could even help filmmakers identify or generate music for movie scripts, or it could be used to transform social media and Web interactivity, the researchers said. "Imagine a tweet stream that is accompanied by music that captures the aggregated sentiment towards an entity, or displaying the world map where clicking on a particular region plays music that captures the emotions of the tweets emanating from there," Mohammad said.

The study is detailed in a paper on the prepublish site Arxiv.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. Follow the author on Twitter @SciTech_Cat.

The answer to the question, "What do women want?" just got a little weirder. New research finds that when fertile, women are more likely to want a fling with a composer of a complex aria than a simple tune.

The study is the first scientific evidence that music may have evolved as a way to signal intelligence, creativity or dexterity to potential mates.

Charles Darwin first suggested that human music, having no implicit survival value, might have evolved as a way to woo mates. In his book, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1871), he wrote, "It appears probable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes, before acquiring the power of expressing their mutual love in articulate language, endeavored to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm." [How Do I Love Thee? Experts Count 8 Ways]

Music for mating

But no one had ever found evidence that music works in this way. In a 2012 study published in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers played tunes of various complexity for women in different phases of their menstrual cycle and found that they had no preference for complexity around the time of ovulation, when they were most fertile.

Now, one of the authors of that study, Benjamin Charlton of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, has approached the problem in a different way — with different results. This time, instead of testing for a preference for the music itself, Charlton asked women to imagine entering a relationship with the composer of the music.

The researcher recruited 1,465 women from the university and from Amazon's hired-task website Mechanical Turk. None of the women were pregnant, nursing or taking hormonal birth control medications, and all reported regular menstrual cycles. After answering questions about the timing of their menstrual cycle, the researchers played a series of tunes for these women, all similar in melody but different in complexity. (The more complex versions had additional chords and syncopated, or offbeat, notes.)

After hearing the tunes, the women reported whether they'd be interested in entering a short- or long-term relationship with the man who composed them.

Some like it complex

The women's answers revealed that those who were most likely to be in the fertile phase of their monthly cycles were more likely than nonfertile women to say they'd be interested in a short-term relationship with the composer of the more complex pieces.

"Women only preferred composers of more complex music as short-term sexual partners when conception risk was highest," Charlton wrote today (April 22) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

To ensure that women in their fertile phases weren't simply preferring artistic complexity in general, Charlton repeated the experiment using tile mosaics, or pictures of mosaics, of various complexity and found no evidence of a shift in preferences. He also found that the music-complexity effect acted only on short-term relationship preferences, not on interest in long-term relationships.

That finding suggests that women might be tuning into those men who possess the "good genes" that make it possible for them to create complex compositions. Music might be a way to display intelligence and creativity — talents that would benefit potential offspring, Charlton wrote.

Of course, he added, music has other benefits, from cementing social groups to promoting infant development. More research is needed to understand those roles, he wrote. And future work, he wrote, should focus on whether men prefer female composers of complex music as sexual partners, to see if the selection works both ways.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Jessica Gross is a freelance writer in New York City. She has contributed to the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, Kirkus and other publications. This article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts for Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Parag Chordia has spent much of his life thinking about music, first as a performer then as a researcher at Georgia Tech and now as a music app developer. This combination of experiences has led Chordia to pursue questions that most listeners, and even most performers, simply take for granted.

"Most of us are musicians or deeply touched by music," said Chordia of the researchers in his field. "And we also have this kind of engineering or scientific drive to understand why."

Music became a central part of Chordia's life during his high school years in South Salem, N.Y., when his father took him to his first Indian classical music concert. The experience so moved Chordia that by college, he'd decided to pursue Indian classical music performance, and took a year off from school to live in India and study the sarod, a fretless, stringed instrument. (Chordia eventually returned to school, receiving a B.S. in mathematics from Yale and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and music from Stanford University.)

Years later, and after a decade spent studying with renowned sarod teacher Pandit Buddhadev Das Gupta, Chordia is now an experienced performer. What's more, his intense connection to music has blossomed into a career off stage as well. Prior to taking on his current role as chief scientist for music app developer Smule, which he began last year, Chordia founded and directed the Music Intelligence Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Chordia's work, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, has focused on a number of questions: How is sound produced? How can it be manipulated? How is it perceived?

Those questions have, in turn, led to further questions focused on the brain. "How does the brain organize sound, and why does it elicit the types of responses and emotions that it does?" Chordia asked. At Georgia Tech, Chordia and his colleagues wanted to better understand the connection between music and the voice. [From Dino Brains to Thought Control — 10 Fascinating Brain Findings]

"We said, OK, when a person is happy, their speech sounds different than when they're sad," he explained. A sad person speaks softly, slowly, often mumbles and has a darker tone. A happy person speaks more quickly and brightly. "We started to wonder, is music bootstrapping off of the same processes? In other words, are those fundamental acoustic cues being used to signify happiness and sadness in music?"

Chordia's team created an artificial melody, then shifted it to sound either slightly higher or slightly lower in pitch. One group of participants heard the higher melody, followed by the original. The second group heard the lower melody, followed by the original. So both groups heard exactly the same melody in the second position. The surprising results: The participants experienced that identical melody differently.

Those in the first group, who heard the higher melody first, described the second melody as sad, presumably because it was lower than the first sample they heard. Meanwhile, those in the second group described the second melody as happy, presumably because it was higher than the first sample they heard. The upshot was that pitch does confer emotion in music in a way that mimics people's response to vocal expression. This, Chordia explained, is why a tremolo in music registers as intense — it reminds people of the way an angry, adrenaline-spurred voice shakes.

Those findings help explain some of the power of Indian classical music, Chordia said. This kind of music overlaps with human vocal properties, which is part of what makes it "so emotive and expressive," he said.

In another takeaway, the study also showed that people's experience of music is relative to what they've heard before; that is, a person's perception of music isn't static.

Neither is music itself. Chordia explained that music strikes a remarkable balance between predictability and novelty. Humans are simultaneously attracted to both elements. On the one hand, evolutionarily speaking, accurately predicting what's to come offers a reward: If people can anticipate threats, they're in better shape than if they can't. On the other hand, the drive toward novelty is vital: If people never sought out new sources of food or new social connections, they'd be less successful.

As a result, people's reward systems kick in — that is, they experience pleasure — in both instances.

"I think what's really interesting about music is that it plays off of both these things," said Chordia, who has studied this phenomenon through computational and statistical modeling of music's structure. "One of the ways that we describe music is 'safe thrills.' It's like a roller coaster. On the one hand, you know nothing really bad is going to happen, but there are all these pleasant surprises along the way. A lot of music is like that: you set up a pattern and expectation, and then you play with it."

That might mean slightly varying the drumbeat, changing the chord pattern, or adding or removing instruments. "Those little surprises, it turns out, can be very pleasurable." They result in what Chordia calls a "supercharged stimulus."

The surprises don't just occur the first time someone hears a song, either. "If you play a segment of music 10 times," Chordia said, "at points of high surprise, there's a distinct pattern you can see in the brain, and what's interesting is that that low-level surprise doesn't disappear." Some habituation does occur, but a piece of music can give people that little jolt of surprised pleasure even if they know the tune very well.

As a performer, Chordia isn't just interested in how people perceive music. His research also investigates what happens to individuals while they play music. In one study, Chordia and his colleagues hooked trained musicians up to an EEG machine, which measures electrical activity in the brain, while the musicians played simple, familiar songs, and then improvised.

Based on preliminary data, it appears that when the musicians improvised, certain areas of their brains were actually muted. That is, rather than requiring more activity across the brain, a highly creative state benefits from fewer active areas, so that more-disparate regions can communicate with each other and create unexpected new insights. (This is perhaps one reason, Chordia suggested, that alcohol and music often go hand-in-hand.)

But making music doesn't just enable new kinds of communication within the brain; it also enables an incredible level of synchronicity among people. If you've ever sung in a chorus, attended a concert or played in a band, you probably recall the camaraderie. Chordia and his colleagues wanted to figure out if there was neurological basis for this sensation.

Using fMRI scans, which measure changes in neural blood flow, the researchers found that people who listened to the same piece of music had activity in similar areas of the brain at the same time. "If you think about it, this is pretty amazing," Chordia said, pointing out that fMRIs of two people talking or writing or gazing out the window together wouldn't yield this kind of coordinated brain activity. "I think our powerful intuition [about music] that it is a shared experience is true."

In recent years, Chordia's interest in the roles of performer and audience, and how the two overlap, has led to his latest endeavor: creating apps that turn listeners into performers.

In his current role at app-maker Smule, Chordia aims to encourage people who don't think of themselves as musicians to sing and play, and to help people to connect with each other through music. He works to accomplish both goals using smartphones, creating app-based answers to the question,"How can we create a 21st-century folk music through technology?"

Yes, there's the irony of fighting isolation via the devices that enable it. But in another sense, Chordia's work represents a natural next step in musical evolution: every instrument is a kind of technology. Smartphones are simply a digital kind.

LaDiDa, one of Smule's apps that grew out of Chordia's academic research, creates background music for users' vocal samples, a sort of reverse karaoke. Smule's Songify app turns speech into a song, while the company's AutoRap program turns speech into rapping. Creating each app involved extensive research into the fundamentals of how music works (answering questions like, "What is rap, exactly, and how can a computer create it?").

The broader from these kind of apps is that everyone can sing — you included.

Other apps help advance the collaborative-music piece of Smule's mission. Sing! Karaoke allows users to perform karaoke with their friends, while logged into smartphones far away from one another. On Guitar! lets users can create the background music for other people's vocal samples.

Given Chordia's academic discoveries, as well as his experience playing Indian classical music, his passion for reviving shared music-making experiences isn't surprising. "Playing classical music is less about performing and more about immersing yourself in it," Chordia said.

But regardless of his work with music, both onstage and in the lab, Chordia admits some aspects of music's emotional resonance that may never be fully understood. "At the most fundamental level," he said, "my research really stems from this question: Why are we as humans so attracted to musical sounds? What is it about music that moves us? Why does this abstract pattern of sonic activity give rise to some of our most cherished human emotions? It's really weird, actually, if you think about it."

The NEA is committed to encouraging work at the intersection of art, science and technology through its funding programs, research, and online as well as print publications. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Tattoos are all about self-expression, and now one artist has taken that body modification to an extra sensory dimension: A new project allows the musically inclined to make music from their bicep body art.

The project, called "Reading my Body" was created by Russian visual artist Dmitry Morozov. The project uses rail-mounted sensors that crawl across the skin to read a tattoo that resembles a chunky barcode. The "notes" and instructions for the sensors are inked into flesh.

Luckily, the sensors can move on their own or be controlled manually, meaning each tattoo isn't limited to just one score, Ubergizmo reported. So even though the tattoo may be forever, anyone getting inked won't be forced to listen to the same song for the rest of their life.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. 

Who doesn't appreciate a good tune? Apparently, some people don't "get" music, researchers have found.

Although these people may be capable of experiencing pleasure in other ways — such as through food, money or sex — they don't enjoy music, according to a study published online today (March 6) in the journal Current Biology.

Scientists have long known about amusia, a specific impairment in music perception that can be either innate or acquired — for instance, as a result of brain damage. This impairment can prevent people from processing music in the way most people do. But the participants in the new study did not have amusia, and yet they were still indifferent to music, the researchers found.

"What we found was that there were people who specifically didn't enjoy music, but they enjoyed other kinds of rewards," said study author Josep Marco-Pallarés of the University of Barcelona.

The study's authors called this condition "specific musical anhedonia," an inability to experience pleasure from music. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

In the study, the research team examined 30 people divided evenly into three groups. The participants were asked to do a music task and a so-called monetary-incentive-delay task. In the music task, participants listened to music that mostly included classical pieces composed by, for instance, Beethoven and Vivaldi, and rated how pleasant they found the music. In the monetary-incentive-delay task, participants were asked to respond in order to win or not lose between 20 eurocentsand 2 euros (about 25 cents to $2.75).

Both tasks are usually associated with inducing some sort of emotional reaction in the brain. To gauge the participants' emotional responses to the tasks, the researchers analyzed heart rate and skin conductance (a measure of how well the skin conducts electricity). When a person is experiencing strong emotions, they tend to sweat more, which increases their skin conductance.  

It turns out that some of the participants were emotionally oblivious to the music they were listening to, but they reacted to the monetary-incentive-delay task. Interestingly, they were still able to tell what emotions the music was supposed to represent, Marco-Pallarés told Live Science.

The researchers are not sure why some of the participants were indifferent to music, he said.

"We know that these people can enjoy other rewards," Marco-Pallarés said.

However, the researchers do know that the same area in the brain, the so-called reward system, is activated when a person is enjoying music and other kinds of rewards, like money, he said.

"But probably, this system is connected to other function areas in the brain, and this might explain why they enjoy other rewards but not music," Marco-Pallarés said, adding that further research is needed to explain this finding.

Follow Agata Blaszczak-Boxe on Twitter . Follow Live Science@livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

(ISNS) – George Gershwin might not agree but not everything's “got rhythm.” Only a few organisms can move according to a natural, musical rhythm, and scientists are puzzled.

Some apes can move to music and even play some instruments, scientists report, as can some birds, and even a sea lion, but entrainment -- the word scientists use to describe rhythmic synchronization of an organism to an external rhythm -- does not appear to be widespread in the animal kingdom, researchers reported at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago earlier this month.

Humans do it when we dance. Snowball, a cockatoo, became famous for clearly dancing to music, but it turns out she is a rarity. The evolutionary origin of entrainment is still a matter of conjecture. Why do some animals do it but most don’t?

In 1837, Charles Darwin, fresh from his voyage on the HMS Beagle, went to the London Zoo to see his first great ape, an orangutan named Jenny, and played a harmonica for her. She did not react to his performance, but when he handed it to her she put it to her mouth. Nothing came out, but Darwin, fascinated, devoted 10 pages in the Descent of Man to music and evolution, said Aniruddh Patel, of Tufts University, in Medford, Mass.

Twelve years ago, Patricia Gray of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro went to Atlanta to visit a group of bonobos, a kind of chimpanzee that shares more than 98 percent of the human genome. One of the bonobos, named Kanzi, had become famous for her ability to respond to languages. Gray said she was idly tapping the glass outside Kanzi’s enclosure when the ape began repeating the beat back to her.

When Gray changed tempo, so did Kanzi. Eventually the bonobo tapping her feet to the rhythm while lying on her back.

Later, at the Jacksonville Zoo she brought a custom-made drum to a group of bonobos, and the music came spontaneously, she said.

Peter Gabriel, the rock musician, later brought a small band to entertain the bonobos and the apes played instruments right back at them. Not everyone is convinced that is entrainment, but it sounds like it.

There also is a YouTube video of musician-scientist David Rothenberg playing a clarinet with a beluga whale, but that also is not necessarily entrainment.

Peter Cook, now at Emory University in Atlanta, did research with a California sea lion at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The sea lion was trained to move its head in time to the music, including reacting to tempos she never heard before.

“Boogie Wonderland was her favorite,” Cook said.

Edward Large of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton said almost every area of the human brain responds when synchronizing with music and musical rhythm, activating both the portions that govern motion and hearing -- hence dance.

"The networks of the brain communicate with each other by synchronizing rhythm,” he said.

He said the bonobos should be analogous to human children who can hear rhythm, but can’t actually synchronize with it until reaching about 4 years old.

Children synchronize with rhythm eventually as part of a socialization process, the ability to interact with others, he theorizes, which may explain its evolutionary origin.

“But if it is so powerful, why don’t all animals deploy it endlessly?” he asked.

Every animal tested seems to have the same ability humans have to perceive pitch -- high or low sounds. Some show evidence of hearing tonality -- the musical notes.

No one knows why only humans and some animals have developed the ability to synchronize with rhythm, the scientists agree.

“There are a whole menu of theories,” Large said.

Darwin thought it had something to do with courtship rites, which seems reasonable, Patel said. Most scientists now think there is a strong social component to the evolution of entrainment, the panelists at the meeting said.

Many think it has to do with vocal mimicry, or the ability to mimic sounds. This ability to synchronize shows group unity and bonding.

“Humans synchronize in an effort to display something about a group of individuals,” said Greg Bryant, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not part of the panel but has written extensively on the subject.

“When a group of individuals generates a complicated rhythmic display, they are giving an honest signal about their time together and how well they can coordinate their actions,” Bryant said.

“The rarity is probably due to the combination of skills that are required along with the evolutionary pressure to develop the ability,” he said. 

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Joel Shurkin is a freelance writer based in Baltimore. He is the author of nine books on science and the history of science, and has taught science journalism at Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He tweets at @shurkin.

When jazz musicians let their creativity flow and start to improvise melodies, they use parts of their brains typically associated with spoken language — specifically, regions that help people interpret syntax or the structure of sentences, according to a new study.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine in Baltimore tracked brain activity as two jazz musicians played pieces from memory and then engaged in back-and-forth improvisation, creating something akin to a spontaneous musical conversation. They found that areas of the brain associated with syntax and language were very active as the musicians were improvising.

"The areas of the brain related to language ramped way up when the musical behavior was spontaneous between the two musicians," said Charles Limb, an associate professor in the department of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins and senior author of a new study published today (Feb. 19) in the journal PLOS ONE. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

Syntax vs. semantics

While this seems to demonstrate that the brain uses the same syntactic areas to process musical notes and spoken words, Limb said the mechanisms are more complex than simply thinking of music as a universal language.

"During the improvised exchanges, the parts of the brain that interpret the meaning of language — semantics — were completely deactivated," Limb told Live Science. "I figured we would have the involvement of language areas during spontaneous musical conversation, but I did not really anticipate the semantic area would be deactivated the way it was."

This could suggest there is a fundamental difference between how the brain processes meaning for music and language.

"Syntax has more to do with grammar and the structure of language — basically the rules of language," Limb explained. "Semantics has more to do with the meaning of words. So, if music has semantics, it's not processed in the way that is traditionally used for language."

Limb and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track brain activity as two jazz pianists performed.

"Until now, studies of how the brain processes auditory communication between two individuals have been done only in the context of spoken language," Limb said in a statement. "But looking at jazz lets us investigate the neurological basis of interactive, musical communication as it occurs outside of spoken language."

Creativity in action

The researchers chose to focus on jazz musicians because of their impressive ability to invent new melodies on the spot, particularly as part of an exercise known as "trading fours," when musicians participate in improvised call and response-style exchanges that typically last four bars.

"Jazz is maybe one of the best models to study spontaneous creativity," Limb said. "Jazz musicians have brains that are so remarkably capable of improvising that it's a rare opportunity to glimpse the inner workings of the brain in action."

Limb is a musician himself, and has long been interested in the relationship between music and language.

"I'm somebody who is a musician and has always loved music deeply, but decided not to be a musician. I became a hearing specialist and surgeon instead," Limb said. "But, the research in my lab is about understanding how we're able to accomplish musical things, how the brain is able to hear music, and other areas of high-level creativity."

Limb said securing funding for this type of research is tricky, but he hopes to study brain activity across various types of creative activities, including writing and painting. He is also interested in investigating whether there are differences between children and adults, or between amateurs and professionals.

Still, Limb considers himself fortunate to be able to incorporate his love of music into his life's work. "I'm maybe the luckiest surgeon in the world," he said.

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Last Sunday (Feb. 2, 2104) marks the 50th anniversary of John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in the US. But what was it about? Was it the moptop haircuts, Cuban heels, and “yeah yeah yeahs” that turned us, our parents, or our grandparents into primeval beings whose sole purpose was to drown out the blare of a Vox AC30 amplifier?

The term “Beatlemania” has come to be associated with many things over the past half-century. Coined in October 1963 during the Beatles’ tour of Scotland, the extent of Beatlemania in the US is obvious from record sales alone.

Between the 1964 release of I Want to Hold Your Hand on the Billboard Hot 100 and the Let it Be EP in 1970, the Lads from Liverpool had a Number One single for, on average, one out of every six weeks and a top-selling album every third week.

But to most, Beatlemania conjures up a vivid image of frenzied fans, predominantly teenage girls, with facial expressions that look more like they’d witnessed a gruesome murder, and “I love George!” badges hanging on for dear life as their owners attempted to push past overwhelmed human police barricades. Lots of tears and lots of screaming.

But what can neuroscience tell us about what might have been happening in their brains?

Why do we like music?

One could argue that fanatics were interested in more than just the Beatles' musical talent, but record sales prove that people did enjoy a Beatles tune. And what about music can make us tap our toes, lulls babies to sleep, well up with emotion, dance around or stir up furious mosh pits?

In short, we know music makes us feel good; even those tunes that incite a feeling of sadness may bring us pleasure because we can relate to them. Take one 2001 study by researchers Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre at McGill University. They recruited ten individuals who had at least some formal music training. Each participant selected a song that, they claimed, gave them (good) chills.

The researchers played a 90-second excerpt of their chosen song while the subject laid in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, a device that measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Compared to control (neutral) sounds, music that elicits physical and emotional changes activated limbic, paralimbic, and midbrain regions. And these areas are implicated in pleasure and reward, not unlike the neural pathways that recognise yummy food, addictive drugs, and sex.

In an extension to this study published last April, Zatorre’s group used fMRI to scan the brains of 19 volunteers while they listened to the first 30 seconds of 60 songs they’d never heard before. Participants then rated how much they were willing to spend if they were to buy each song, from $0 to $2.

As it turns out, connections between a limbic system structure called the amygdala with the hippocampus (involved in learning and memory) as well as the prefrontal cortex (important for decision-making) could predict how much participants were willing to spend on each song.

The strength of these connections may partially explain why die-hard Metallica fans might completely shun hip-hop, while others may refuse to listen to anything but country. Music is a personal preference, and although we know that it brings us pleasure, that’s about the extent of our understanding.

What’s with all the crying and fainting?

Typically, we equate crying with sadness and fainting with illness.

The truth is, our brains are actually pretty dumb, and any sudden, strong emotion – from happiness to relief to stress – can elicit these vulnerable physical reactions.

Our autonomic nervous system (the “involuntary” nervous system) is divided into two branches: sympathetic (“fight-or-flight”) and parasympathetic (“rest-and-digest”). Acting via the hypothalamus, the sympathetic nervous system is designed to mobilise the body during times of stress. It’s why our heart rate quickens, why we sweat, why we feel ready to run. The parasympathetic nervous system, on the other hand, essentially calms us back down.

The parasympathetic nervous system does something funny, too. Connected to our lacrimal glands (better known as tear ducts), activation of parasympathetic receptors by the neurotransmitter acetylcholine results in tear production. So for those fans relieved to finally see their Fab Four, tears were commonplace.

For others, though, the sudden activation of their parasympathetic nervous system is accompanied by something much more dramatic. A quick drop in blood pressure results from vessels widening and heart rate slowing, hence the fainting.

Fainting, crying … exactly the things you’d want your hero to see you do when you finally meet them, right?

Everybody’s crazy ‘bout a sharp-dressed man

Let’s be honest, there’s a reason Beatlemania is typified by hordes of young women: The Beatles looked good.

When Brian Epstein officially signed on as the Beatles’ manager in early 1962, the first thing he did was smarten up their stage appearance; he fitted them into Edwardian collarless suits, matching boots, and choreographed a synchronised bow at the end of each song.

According to a 2011 survey, 91% of Americans believe that a well-dressed man appears smarter, sexier, and more successful than one who is not, regardless of their overall physical attractiveness or how much money they have.

And a 1990 study of 382 college students by the University of Toledo examined just how clothes can make the man. One “attractive” and one “unattractive” man (as previously determined by a panel of females) donned a variety of clothes – from designer watches and pressed shirts to baseball caps and Burger King polos. Consistently, women rated the well-dressed man as more attractive than the sloppier one, regardless of which model sported which ensemble.

The Beatles had some pretty great hair, too. Inspired by a man they saw during a gig in Hamburg, Germany, John and Paul reportedly hitchhiked to Paris and requested the distinctive haircut.

Across cultures, long, shiny female hair is rated attractive by both genders. Evolutionary psychologists reason that the ability to grow long hair can reveal several years of a person’s health status, age, nutrition, and reproductive fitness, as vitamin deficiencies result in hair loss.

Plus, moptops eliminate any sign of androgenic alopecia, or male-pattern baldness, which studies have been associated with perceived ageing and less attractiveness. But don’t worry, men – evolutionary biologists theorise that baldness is actually a sign of dominance, longevity, and social status due to its cause – a more potent form of testosterone called DHT.

Although the fans may have drowned out the music with their shrieks, at least they still had a sight to behold.

So 50 years ago this Sunday, 73m Americans crowded around 60% of the country’s televisions to watch the Beatles’ debut, and the birth of Beatlemania. But while there are some explanations for why frenzied fans might have reacted the way they did to the Fab Four, for some the teenage shrieks and hysteria remained utterly baffling.

Jordan Gaines Lewis does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

(ISNS) — When a classical string quartet starts playing, someone starts them off with a downbeat. Then it's every man or woman for themselves.

But good string quartets seem to keep perfect time, playing each note at just the right beat, blending in and out just as the composer wished, seemingly in perfect unity. How do they do that without a conductor?

A team of scientists and musicians from the United Kingdom and Germany wired two world-class string quartets with microphones plugged into computers running the same kind of program that Wall Street traders use to buy stocks and climatologists use to track and measure atmospheric changes in real time.

They found the musicians used two forms of coordination, but in both cases, they were altering their playing in degrees measured in milliseconds without any verbal or physical help, even modifying what they were playing if one of them changes the tempo.

"In some other music, people just come and play together, but in a string quartet, like any ensemble, have to become one organism," said Alan Wing, a professor of psychology at the University of Birmingham, England. "It's remarkable."

A string quartet classically consists of two violins — a first and second — a viola and a cello. Traditionally, the first violinist is the team captain — often called "The Leader" — but in recent years, quartets have become more democratic with no one leader.

It depends largely on the sociology of the group, said Adrian Bradbury, a professional cellist who has played with such orchestras as the Royal Philharmonic in London and a member of the research team.

In their study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the researchers wired two world-class quartets and had them play 48 beats of music from the opening of Franz Joseph Haydn's Quartet Op. 74 No.1's fourth movement. One of the quartets used the first violinist as leader, the other had no set leader.

To add uncertainty into the playing, the researchers told one or another musician to make a subtle change in the tempo to see what the other three would do, Wing said.

Then the results were fed into a computer that was running a similar program that Wall Street traders use to track stock prices and make instantaneous buying or selling decisions. Essentially, it measures the effect of one stream of data against another over time.

When any of the musicians altered the tempo the researchers looked to the next beat. Followers would have made the adjustment. Just by watching which player adjusted to whom, the researchers were able to tell which group member was following and which was leading.

In the quartet led by the first violin, the other three made their adjustments depending on what the leader was doing. Rarely did the leader adjust to them. In the more democratic ensemble, they all adjusted to each other.

Bradbury pointed out that many quartets play together for years — quartets that have been together for 40 or more are not unusual — and these kinds of seamless adjustments come naturally and without the audience ever noticing.

"You want the audience to take in information without being explicit," Bradbury said.

At rehearsals, the quartet is merely making sure they know the music well enough so that if one member varies, the ensemble follows, he said. Even in chamber music where the notes and the timing commands are clear, musicians will vary qualities such as the tempo as they express emotion. Without that spontaneity, the music would be dead, Wing said.

Michael Kannen, a cellist and one of the founding members of the Brentano String Quartet said he wasn't surprised. Good musicians do not really need a conductor; even full symphony orchestras can play well without them. Great conductors bring interpretation and shape the piece. The musicians can time themselves.

In rock groups, the musicians play off the drummer; in jazz bands, they get their timing from the rhythm section, Kannen said.

Most of the time, the first violin is playing the melody, the cello is playing the bass line, and everyone else is doing the inner voices or the rhythm, but it is constantly shifting, he said.

"Musicians play with their ears, not their eyes," Kannen said. "It's like any sport or amazing feat," he said. "Once you develop the skill it doesn't seem so hard anymore."

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Joel Shurkin is a freelance writer based in Baltimore. He is the author of nine books on science and the history of science, and has taught science journalism at Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He tweets at @shurkin.

This Research in Action article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Studies by researcher Nina Kraus have shown that lifelong musical training is associated with the ability to hear and understand sounds in a noisy environment, even as we age. But what about people who have had limited musical training — four or five years of piano or guitar lessons as a child, for example? A recent study by Kraus's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University suggests that even limited exposure to music may help inoculate us from some types of age-related declines in brain functioning. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that four to 14 years of musical training early in life is associated with faster neural timing in response to speech. Test subjects listened to a synthesized speech sound ("the syllable "da") by itself — without any other competing noise — and also amid other, background noises. She found that the group of test subjects who had had some musical training responded neurally to the syllable both in quiet and in noise more quickly than did the groups of test subjects without musical training. This result is relevant especially to older people, who often show difficulty processing fast-changing speech elements--consonant to vowel transitions, for example.

Other studies by Kraus have shown that musical training correlates to a better ability to pick out key sounds, such as spoken words, in noisy environments (see video), and a better ability to recognize the emotional content of sound.

Kraus is the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology at Northwestern University. Much of her research is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Related:

Fine-Tuned Brains

Musical Experience Benefits Brain Function

Report Says Musicians Hear Better Than Non-Musicians

Musicians Remember Better

Editor's Note: Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Research in Action archive.

Music could be used to track human migration patterns over history, new research suggests.

That conclusion, described Tuesday (Nov. 12) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, came from examining a genetic analysis of indigenous populations in Taiwan along with the people's folk music. Populations with more similar folk music also tended to be more closely related, the researchers found.

Scientists propose that the Austronesian-speaking people who populate the Pacific, from Papua New Guinea to the Philippines to Hawaii, originally set sail from Taiwan between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago. To trace this migration, researchers have studied the genetics of pigs, coconuts and head lice, as well as archaeological remains and linguistics. [The 9 Craziest Ocean Voyages]

Though most people in Taiwan today are ethnically Chinese, the island retains a small population of aboriginal people, who are likely descendants of this ancestral Austronesian population.

Steven Brown, a neuroscientist at McMaster University in Canada, and his colleagues wondered whether music held clues to human migration.

Originally, they planned to compare musical selections to trace the entire Pacific migration. But with more than 1,200 Austronesian languages to study, they soon realized they were in over their heads.

Instead, the researchers looked at the population makeup of Taiwan. They compiled recordings of 220 folk or traditional choral music songs from nine aboriginal populations that have remained fairly isolated from each other over their history. The researchers also excluded music with any pop elements or Christian influences, as these were likely to be influenced by newer trends.

At the same time, the team analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which is carried in the cytoplasm of a woman's egg and is therefore passed on through the maternal line, from 640 people in the aboriginal groups.

By comparing elements of the music, such as pitch, texture and rhythm, with the genetic data, the team found that groups with more similar musical styles also tended to be more closely related genetically.

Though using folk music to trace human migrations wouldn't replace genetic or linguistic studies, it could add an additional layer of information, Brown said. Because music is universal but also diverse enough for differences to track with population changes, it could be used to study many different regions of the world.

"We 're trying to add music as a new kind of evidence," Brown said. "The more kinds of things you can include in the story of humanity, the better off you are."

Now Brown and his colleagues are studying music in Japan to see if it can shed light on that island's ancient history.

"This is a landmark study, which has revived some old debates about musical coding and cultural and geographical mapping in the 1970s with fresh perspectives," Shzr Ee Tan, a music researcher at Royal Holloway University of London, who studies Taiwanese aboriginal folksong, wrote in an email.

Still, there are some caveats, she said.

"It's becoming increasingly hard to pin down what folk means — the idea that it equates with authentic and untainted is really a romantic and untenable one," Tan told LiveScience.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

(ISNS) -- People who have cochlear implants placed in their heads had often never heard a sound in their lives before their implant. Once the device is placed, they can experience hearing, and often can even understand human speech.

Hearing music, however, has remained out of reach.

But now, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed an algorithm that vastly improves the sound quality of existing implants to the point where music sounds like something other than a random clamor.

People with the current versions of cochlear implants can hear rhythm, said Les Atlas, a professor of electrical engineering. Atlas himself has a partial loss of hearing. Subjects whose implants have been given a "major tweak" with the new algorithm can tell the difference between instruments.

"If they are hearing a single guitar, they can hear one note," said Atlas of current wearers. "If a person is playing fast, they can hear that. If a person is playing slow they can hear that."

However, the new algorithm does not allow their hearers to discern melody; that's the next project.

The work is published in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. Atlas' coauthor is Jay Rubinstein, an engineer who went to medical school and became a surgeon.  

Cochlear implants relay sound from a microphone placed outside the ear to a device connected to the auditory nerves inside the ear. The sound a cochlear implant conveys is just a fraction of the sound a person with normal hearing can detect. But, for people with damaged sensory cells, they are the only hope of hearing much of anything.

The Washington study deliberately set out to modify existing devices so that people would not have to buy new implants to hear music.

The new algorithm was tested on eight cochlear-implant patients, and the researchers used anecdotal reports and computer simulations to recreate what the subjects heard.

Atlas said what implant patients hear now is the equivalent of someone playing a piano with their forearms. All the sound is "mushed together," and it is impossible to pick out a tune. Or, they can hear someone singing but cannot tell the difference between a man or a woman, a baritone or a soprano.

Music is characterized by attributes such as pitch and timbre. Pitch defines the melody notes of a song and the intonation of speech. Timbre is the difference in sound between instruments. For example, an A natural played on an oboe sounds different from a trumpet playing exactly the same note.

It is the pitch and timbre Atlas and Rubinstein were trying to improve. With the new algorithm, they could expand what most -- not all -- of the subjects heard from one octave to three. A low note could have a frequency of 80 cycles a second, or Hertz, something users of conventional implants can hear. With the new algorithm, some could hear up to 320 Hertz, closest in pitch to the E above middle C on a piano.

There is still a vast amount of aural information the new algorithm misses. Subjects can hear individual instruments, but a symphony orchestra is a cacophony.

The work is important because music is the hardest thing to hear, explained Charles Limb, a professor of otolaryngology, head and neck surgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, a faculty member of the Peabody School of Music and science advisor to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He said the Atlas-Rubinstein work is well-known in the cochlear-implant community.

Speech is relatively easy, Limb said, because the purpose of speech is to communicate a thought, which does not depend on high-quality sound. For example, the voice of Siri on Apple's iPhone communicates information effectively despite the artificial nature of the sound itself.

Music, however, depends on the quality of sound, he said.

Cochlear implants are getting better, he said, but getting better at speech. Little research has gone into music.

"Music is the hardest thing you can hear," he said. "If you can hear music, you can hear anything. If you design the perfect cochlear implant that could hear something like music very well then you can hear anything there is in the world."

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. Joel Shurkin is a freelance writer based in Baltimore. He is the author of nine books on science and the history of science, and has taught science journalism at Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He tweets at @shurkin.

One night as she lay down to sleep, a 60-year-old woman suddenly started having strange hallucinations. She told her doctors she heard music that seemed like it was playing from a radio at the back of her head.

Within a few months, she was hearing music all the time, with some songs on repeat for up to three weeks. Curiously, she did not recognize many of the tunes that dogged her, but they had full vocals and instrumentals; and when she sang or hummed the melodies for her husband, he identified them as popular songs.

Her experience was described in a case report in Frontiers in Neurology, and researchers say it seems possible that these familiar songs were locked away in her memory and inaccessible, except during hallucinations. [The 9 Oddest Medical Case Reports]

"To our knowledge, this is the first report of musical hallucinations of non-recognizable songs that were recognized by others in the patient's environment," neurologists Danilo Vitorovic and José Biller of Loyola University Medical Center wrote. "This raises intriguing questions about musical memory, as well as mechanisms of forgetting."

Hallucinations occur when people have a sensory experience without any apparent stimuli — they see, hear, or even smell things that aren't there. Musical hallucinations are one form of auditory hallucinations, and they tend to occur in older people. Other conditions have been possibly linked to the experience, such as a hearing impairment, brain damage, epilepsy and psychiatric disorders, researchers say.

The woman described in the case report was hearing-impaired. She had previously been diagnosed with moderate hearing loss and tinnitus, a condition characterized by a ringing in the ears. She experienced some improvement in her hallucination symptoms when she was treated with carbamazepine, an anti-seizure drug, the researchers said.

Vitorovic and Biller write that her case begs for further study on what happens to forgotten memories. They propose that it's possible this patient had musical memories that were present, but not accessible.

"It is also possible that our patient had fragmented preservation of musical memories, with key portions of those memories lost, precluding recognition," the researchers wrote. "We find this proposition less likely since our patient would recognize music as familiar once it was played to her."

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com

When it comes to music, the eyes may be more important than the ears.

People asked to identify the winner of elite piano performances tend to do better when they rely on visual — rather than auditory — cues, according to a study published today (Aug. 19) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We tend to overweigh and privilege visual information even in this type of domain," said Chia-Jung Tsay, a social psychologist at the University College London and a co-author of the study. [Optical Illusions: A Gallery of Visual Tricks]

Good music?

Exactly how humans decide what makes music good is somewhat mysterious. Past research has revealed that musicians tend to be better than nonmusicians at reading emotions, and other research suggests that well-liked music enables people to synchronize, creating a group identity.

Tsay spent years training as a classical pianist, studied at the Juilliard School in New York and even performed at Carnegie Hall. After going through the competition circuit, she began to notice that the outcomes looked very different depending on whether judges relied on audio recordings or video recordings.

Video recordings

Tsay wanted to know what was accounting for the variation. She collected 6-second video clips of the top three finalists from 10 elite piano competitions. The team then asked 103 professional musicians and 106 musical novices to guess who won based on just the sound, just the video, or the sound and video together.

When the participants heard just the sound recordings, both the experts and the novices were no better than chance at picking the winners.

But with the video only, both groups picked the winner more than half the time.

Interestingly, watching both the sound and the video together made participants only marginally more effective at picking the winner compared with when they listened to the sound alone.

In a follow-up study, Tsay asked 262 participants to identify important music qualities, such as passion or creativity, in video or sound-only clips, and then compared their participants' ratings with real scores the judges gave to the performances in competition.

Once again, participants were better able to identify traits such as passion or motivation in the visual recordings.

The scientists aren't sure why visual cues would be so important in judging musical value, but they suspect the qualities people associate with great music are easily conveyed through visual cues. Humans probably evolved to weigh visual information more heavily, and that may influence musical decisions today, Tsay told LiveScience

"As a musician, it was kind of disturbing to wonder about all those years of training," Tsay said, "and then, in the end, what are we being judged upon?"

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.

When you listen to a lively Mozart piece in a major key, what colors do you see? If bright yellows and oranges swirled in your mind, it wouldn't surprise a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Their new study found that people associate upbeat, major-key music with lighter, more vibrant yellow-toned colors, while slower music in minor keys actually gives people the blues.

These results were the same for participants in both California and Mexico, suggesting humans may have a surprisingly universal emotional color palette. [Eye Tricks: Gallery of Visual Illusions]

"The results were remarkably strong and consistent across individuals and cultures and clearly pointed to the powerful role that emotions play in how the human brain maps from hearing music to seeing colors," study researcher Stephen Palmer, a UC Berkeley vision scientist, said in a statement.

"Surprisingly, we can predict with 95 percent accuracy how happy or sad the colors people pick will be based on how happy or sad the music is that they are listening to," Palmer added.

Palmer and his colleagues studied nearly 100 men and women, half in the San Francisco Bay Area and half in Guadalajara, Mexico. The participants listened to 18 varied pieces of classical music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johannes Brahms. They also were given a 37-color palette and told to choose five colors that best matched each song.

Overall, most people chose an array of warm colors to accompany the upbeat songs and darker, grayer, bluer colors to go with the more somber ones.

The researchers saw the same pattern when they tweaked the experiment to use facial expressions instead of colors — happy faces were matched with upbeat music in major keys, while sad faces were paired with gloomier tunes. The results suggest emotions are responsible for music-color associations.

The scientists hope to expand their research to study other musical norms and cultures. Next, they plan to recruit participants in Turkey, where traditional music often uses scales beyond major and minor keys.

"We know that in Mexico and the U.S. the responses are very similar," Palmer said. "But we don't yet know about China or Turkey."

The study seems consistent with previous research on color associations. One such study published in the journal BMC Medical Research Methodology in 2010 found that people with depression or anxiety were more likely to associate their mood with the color gray, while happier people preferred yellow.

The new research was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and will be presented at the International Association of Colour conference at the United Kingdom's University of Newcastle in July.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

Activity in certain regions of the brain can predict whether you'll like a new song enough to buy it, whether it's indie rock like Florence + The Machine's "Drumming Song" or experimental electronica like Ratatat's "Neckbrace."

Those are just two songs used in new research that explains how new music rewards the brain. The study found that the more active the nucleus accumbens (a small area deep in the brain), the more likely people are to shell out cash for new music. This willingness is especially strong when the nucleus accumbens interacts with a brain region that stores memories of old music.

The study helps explain how something as fleeting and intangible as a string of musical notes can be so rewarding, said study researcher Valorie Salimpoor, a doctoral student at McGill University in Canada. [Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind]

"It's all happening in your head. You have nothing to show for it," Salimpoor told LiveScience. "But somehow, because we have the cognitive resources to be able to process and appreciate these temporal sound patterns, we can experience really intense emotions from them."

The draw of new music

Music seems a uniquely human phenomenon, and it appears across cultures. In fact, a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in December 2012 found that even across vastly different cultures, people express primal emotions through music in strikingly similar ways.

Music is known to engage emotion-processing regions of the brain, and Salimpoor and her colleagues had previously found that music perceived as pleasurable triggers the release of dopamine in the brain, a neurochemical associated with feelings of reward. Food and sex, which are necessary for survival and reproduction, also trigger dopamine release.

That earlier study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, found that people didn't only receive jolts of dopamine at their favorite parts of a song; they got dopamine boosts right before, too. The finding suggested that anticipation is a major part of the pleasure derived from music, but it wasn't clear from where the anticipation was coming.

"Are you anticipating your favorite part because you know it's coming up, or is it the case that you have some general knowledge of music based on all your previous experiences?" Salimpoor said.

To find out, Salimpoor and her colleagues recruited 126 participants and whittled them down to a group of 19 who had very similar tastes in music — they turned out to be lovers of electronica and indie tunes. The researchers used music-recommendation programs to find new songs these participants had never before heard, and then had them listen to those songs for the first time in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI). [Brain Mixtape: List of Songs Used in the Study]

Rewarding notes

As the participants listened, researchers used the fMRI to track blood flow to various brain regions; this blood flow, in turn, is correlated with activity in those regions. After hearing a song clip, participants could choose to buy the tune with their own money, bidding to spend either 99 cents, $1.29 or $2, depending how much they'd liked it.

The researchers found a strong link between how much a person was willing to spend on a song and the nucleus accumbens, in that a busier nucleus accumbens was related to more willingness to drop some cash. This brain region is known to be associated with reward, particularly forming expectations of reward.

"It's really cool, because it's suggesting that as we're listening to new music, we're constantly making predictions," Salimpoor said. "This really links back to our previous study of anticipation and why it would play a role in music."

What's more, as people were willing to spend more money on a song, their nucleus accumbens showed greater co-activity with another brain region called the superior temporal gyrus. This is an auditory region that essentially stores sense memories of music heard in the past. If you've heard a lot of Western music, your superior temporal gyrus will have a different "library" than if you grew up listening to music from East Asia, for example.

The study suggests that when you hear new music, your brain flips through this library, building expectations from templates of music heard before. If those predictions are confirmed or pleasantly subverted, you may find yourself loving the new tune.

"We can look at music as an intellectual reward," Salimpoor said, adding, "It's essentially pattern recognition, and this is something humans are very good at."

Several other brain regions were also linked with finding music rewarding, including the emotion-processing amygdala and two higher-level emotion-processing regions found in the frontal lobe of the brain. Another frontal lobe region, the inferior frontal gyrus, was also linked to finding music pleasurable. This area handles advanced thought, working memory and pattern sequencing.

The fact that the brain recruits these advanced brain regions may explain why humans seem alone among animals in appreciating music, Salimpoor said.

"We're able to obtain pleasure from a sequence of sound that has no inherent reward in itself," she said.

The researchers report their findings Friday (April 12) in the journal Science.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.