Blogs / 80beats

As anyone who has a favorite (and least-favorite) musical artist knows, music can affect our moods. Now it seems it can do the same for cotton-top tamarin monkeys, but only when the music is composed specifically for them, according to a study published in the journal Biology Letters.

Except for one anomaly (they liked Metallica), the monkeys didn’t respond to samples of human music–but the tamarins did respond to cello music that was reminiscent of their natural calls. Cellist and composer David Teie studied recordings of both happy and upset tamarins, and used them as the bases for two different kinds of monkey music. “Basically I took those elements and patterned them the way we do normally with music,” he says. “You repeat them, take them up a [musical] third — you know, using the same kind of compositional techniques we use in human music.”  He played the compositions on his cello and then electronically boosted them up three octaves, to a pitch that matched the monkeys’ voices [NPR].

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One of the greatest musical geniuses the world has ever seen might have been struck down at the height of his powers by a bacterial infection that school nurses yawn at. A new analysis suggests that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may have died of complications relating to strep throat.

Mozart died on December 5, 1791 in Vienna after abruptly taking ill about two weeks before. The cause of death for the 35-year-old man was recorded as “fever and rash,” which even in the 18th century were considered symptoms, not a disease. Many causes have been suggested over the centuries: syphilis, the effects of treatment with salts of mercury, rheumatic fever, vasculitis leading to renal failure, infection from a bloodletting procedure, trichinosis from eating undercooked pork chops [The New York Times]. As no autopsy was conducted at the time of death and the common grave that held Mozart’s remains was later dug up to make room for new graves, modern medical sleuths have little direct evidence to go on.

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Evaluating the happiness of an entire society is tricky–after all, the traditional survey-based method of collecting data doesn’t work for such a huge population. But now scientists say they have come up with a way to quantify the well-being of a society: by analyzing song lyrics and blog posts for emotionally charged words, according to a study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies. Among their findings, researchers determined that bloggers in their 50s and 60s are most content, and that popular music has become increasingly less happy since the 1960s.

To evaluate the overall happiness of the public, researchers pulled data from nearly two-and-a-half million blogs and 230,000 song lyrics. With the aid of their own computers, the researchers scanned the texts for more than 1000 emotionally charged words that a 1999 psychology study had ranked on a scale from 1 (miserable) to 9 (ecstatic). “Triumphant” and “love” topped the list with average scores greater than 8.7, whereas “disgusted” was one of the lowest at 2.45. The researchers then calculated an average happiness score for each text based on the words’ scores and frequencies [ScienceNOW Daily News]. They found that although certain days of the year always show fluctuations in the blog world (Christmas and Valentine’s Day show a spike in happiness, while September 11 shows a dip in well-being), overall happiness among the bloggers since 2005 has increased about 4 percent.

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A 35,000-year-old flute made of vulture bone found in a cave in southwestern Germany is the world’s oldest known musical instrument. The artifact suggests music may have been one advantage our ancestors had over their cousins, the now-extinct Neanderthals, according to a report published in the journal Nature.

The five-holed flute, which is fully intact and made from a griffon vulture’s radius bone, was discovered with fragments of other flutes crafted out of mammoth ivory. The bird-bone instrument was found in a region in which similar instruments have popped up lately, says lead author Nicholas Conard, but this flute is “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves.” … Until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and not as precisely dated to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music [The New York Times]. To make sure the newly discovered instruments were dated correctly, samples were tested independently and using different methods at facilities in England and Germany. Both found the bone to be at least 35,000 years old, during the Modern Paleolithic era.

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It may be the first example of a serious scientific study being launched by a viral video. Neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel was astonished when someone e-mailed him a link to a YouTube video of a sulfur-crested cockatoo named Snowball dancing to the Backstreet Boys.”I said, you know, this is much more than just a cute pet trick. This is potentially scientifically very important,” recalls Patel [NPR].

Researchers had previously assumed that only humans move in time to a beat, but Snowball appeared to bob and rock to the rhythm just like any dancer. But Patel still wondered if the tail-shaking cockatoo had simply learned one dance routine that happened to synchronize to the Backstreet Boys song. For his study, published in Current Biology, Patel made slowed down and sped up versions of the song, and played them back to the bird while Snowball’s owner videotaped the reaction.  They found that Snowball did adjust his moves to match the tempo. At slower speeds the bird swayed rhythmically from side to side, and when the beats came fast and furious, the bird erupted into rapid head-bobbing.

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While that headline may overstate the case slightly for comic effect, researchers say the gist of it is true: Stroke patients with impaired vision who listened to their favorite music showed vastly improved visual processing. Says lead researcher David Soto: “One of the patients chose Kenny Rogers, another Frank Sinatra and the third a country rock band. It’s not a particular kind of music that’s important, as long as the patient enjoys it” [Daily Mail].

Participants in Soto’s study had suffered lesions to their brains’ parietal cortex, a region central to visual and spatial processing. This left them with a condition called visual neglect, in which people lose half their spatial awareness. Victims will sometimes eat food from only one side of their plate, shave one side of their faces, or — as tested in the study — fail to perceive visual prompts on one side of a computer screen [Wired].  

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Isolated people living in the remote mountains of Cameroon have provided evidence that emotions expressed in Western music are universally recognizable, researchers say. In a new study, researchers found that members of the Mafa tribe could pick out happy, sad, and fearful tunes, despite having no exposure to Western music. Most likely the Mafa were picking up on the same “tone of voice” cues used in human speech, said study team member Stefan Koelsch…. “Western music mimics the emotional features of human speech, using the same melodic and rhythmic structures,” Koelsch said [National Geographic News].

Researchers say the Mafa’s ability to parse the emotions expressed in instrumental classical, jazz, and rock music adds evidence to the theory that music played some role in human evolution. Researchers have proposed numerous hypotheses about why humans make music, ranging from emotional communication to group solidarity. Other scientists, such as Harvard University linguist Steven Pinker, have countered that music is just “auditory cheesecake” with no real evolutionary significance. If music is the result of Darwinian selection, it’s likely that all members of the human species, regardless of their culture, will respond to it in similar ways [ScienceNOW Daily News].

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Two guitarists playing the same melody together don’t just tap their feet to the same beat to stay coordinated: New research shows that their brains sync up, producing brain patterns that are virtually identical. In the study, researchers had pairs of professional guitar players play short melodies together while their neural activity was monitored with an electroencephalogram (EEG). Researchers found that the synchrony kicked in when the lead guitar player marked the tempo and indicated when to begin. As the pair continued playing, their brain waves oscillated in synchrony from the same brain regions. This suggests that the same sets of neurons were at work, and at the same rhythm, in both players [New Scientist].

In a common sense result, researchers found coordination in the parts of the brain that control motor activity. But they also saw synchronized activity in regions that are linked with “theory of mind” – the recognition that other creatures think and act independently – as well as brain “mirror” systems that enable people to subconsciously mimic the actions and feelings of others. The researchers think these areas may have been activated to increase the bonding and synchrony between the players in the shared task of playing the duet [New Scientist].

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Babies just a few days old can already identify a rhythmic pattern, and their brains show surprise when the music skips a beat, according to a new study. Researchers played recordings that used high-hat cymbals, snare drums, and bass drums to make a funky little beat while monitoring the infants‘ brain activity with non-invasive electroencephalogram brain scanners, and found that newborns respond to a skipped beat in the same way that adults do.

The ability to follow a beat is called beat induction. Neither chimpanzees nor bonobos — our closest primate relatives — are capable of beat induction, which is considered both a uniquely human trait and a cognitive building block of music. Researchers have debated whether this is inborn or learned during the few first months of life, calibrated by the rocking arms and lullabies of parents [Wired News]. While the researchers who conducted the new study say their findings are evidence that beat induction in innate, others argue that the newborns could have already learned to identify rhythmic patterns by listening to their mothers’ heartbeats while in the womb.

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