Browsing: Music

That song stuck in your head is your brain doing its work.

On the science and talent of music.

Pianist Vijay Iyer gives us a master class in the science of rhythm.

DJ Angst kicked off the late-February show at the Root Cellar Lounge in Bloomington, Indiana, keeping in mind that, as the first DJ to play, it was his job to figure out what would lure people to the dance floor. As his name implies, he prefers austere, dark electronic music, but he gathered that […]

A composer details how music works its magic on our brains.

In 2009, more than 47 million computers in the U.S. were ready for “end-of-life management”—so hopelessly outmoded that no reasonable amount of refurbishment could redeem them. Market-driven innovation, thus far hewing to the demanding prediction of Moore’s law, means that every few months, the gadgets in our pockets and on our desktops are pushed closer […]

Analyzing music and sculpture in the digital age.

One of the last things you’d expect to see at a physics conference is a physicist on stage, in a dapper hat, pounding out a few riffs of the blues on a keyboard. But that’s exactly what University of Illinois professor J. Murray Gibson did at the recent March meeting of the American Physical Society […]

What a broken bathroom hook has to do with Norwegian ethnography and the cable guy.

From Madonna to Marilyn Manson, or how to worship at the secular altar of pop culture.