Ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing and listening pleasure, it’s the fourth installment of “Symphony of Science.” If you missed the first three iterations of John Boswell’s creation, he auto-tunes the syncopated scientific stylings of Carl Sagan’s monologues from “Cosmos,” combined with guest stars like Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson (of DISCOVER’s StarTalk podcast, among many other media ventures), and Richard Feynman. If you need to catch up, all four are available on Boswell’s site. The first can even be had on vinyl through the label of the White Stripes’ Jack White—Third Man Records.
Here’s the newest, “The Unbroken Thread.” Watch and enjoy.
ABC News reports on an unusual and tragic case of a heart attack triggered by blasting music. A British teenager died shortly after complaining of loud music at a London nightclub, according to reports. Details are sketchy but U.S. doctors suspect a genetic condition may be to blame.
“Any time someone in a setting of excitement has a sudden cardiac arrest, especially at a young age with a seemingly normal heart, you have to consider [an inherited condition] such as long QT,” said Dr. Richard Page, chair of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and president of the Heart Rhythm Society. “One of the genetic variants is especially predisposed to having an arrhythmia when exposed to loud sound.”
When OSHA comes knocking on your lab’s door, you’d better be prepared to explain just how careful you are with your acids, Bunsen burners, and the like. With that in mind, check out The Safety Song from The Sounds of Science, a small group of Berkeley grad students and alums that express their love of science and music with… puppets.
It seems people can’t get enough of songs about science. Scientists can’t stop making them, and we can’t stop watching them. David Haines loves science and he loves songs, so he’s putting on a concert called Tremendous Journey to celebrate his love.
The concert will feature 15 songs about the science of life and evolution. It’s a shorter version of my “science oratorio”, Lifetime. We open with a song called Mr Darwin, which tells the story of his historic voyage aboard the Beagle. Then there is Selfish Gene, a song referring to Richard Dawkins’s work, and Living Light, Queen Bee, Bacteria and Taxonomy.
Meet Emily Howell. She’s a composer who is about to have a CD released of sonatas she composed. So what makes her unique?
She’s a computer program.
Emily was created by University of California-Santa Cruz professor David Cope, who claims to be more of a music teacher than a computer scientist (he’s both). Cope has been working on combining artificial intelligence with music for 30 years—thereby challenging the idea that creating music should be limited to the human mind.
Prior to Emily, Cope created a program called Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI). It allowed the user to pick a composer like Mozart or Bach, then EMI would analyze the music and spit out a new piece that sounded like it had been created by the same composer. But the music EMI “wrote” still needed performers to play it—many of whom refused to perform music that hadn’t been written by a human.
The moon has a bumpy, pitted surface; in fact, it’s vaguely similar to the ridges of an old-fashioned vinyl record. So why not use the moon to make some melodies?
Now you can, thanks to a new program called Moonbell, which is available online for free. Moonbell gives you the chance to do create music by using topographical data to determine how the pitch rises and falls, and the program can produce the sounds of 138 instruments.
The software works by interpreting information provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kaguya satellite, which used a laser altimeter to generate detailed maps of the Moon until its planned crash in June this year.
The music produced by Moonbell synthesises three types of topographical data. The melody is generated by the actual ups and downs in the Moon’s surface, while the “mid tones” are related to the elevation of the immediately surrounding area and the bass line is determined by an even broader section of elevation.
Info sent to Earth from the Kaguya satellite was also used in 2007 for Google Earth’s 3D Moon option.
In preparation for the first-ever National Honey Bee Awareness Day that took place on Aug. 22, big bee backer Häagen-Dazs used the creative efforts of five brothers from Los Altos, Calif. to make a short video raising awareness.
Max Lanman, a 21-year-old senior at Yale majoring in film studies (and the third-oldest Lanman brother), directed, edited and photographed the result of the request, a viral video entitled “Do the Honey Bee.”
In the video, people dressed as bees shimmy and shake, mimicking the ways bees “dance” to communicate with each other. The lyrics extol bees’ agricultural importance, and the beat’s pretty catchy, too.
But don’t take our word for it—check out the video. You just may want to “shake your stinger, bend your knees / Get down real low, and do the honey bee.”
Aldrin teamed up with Snoop Dogg, Quincy Jones, and Soulja Boy to produce the rap. Check out the video spoof of Dogg, Jones, and Aldrin recording, Spinal Tap style. Aldrin hopes the song will foster an interest in space in today’s young people. He told USA Today:
“I’m not too good at carrying a tune, but I do have rhythm,” says Aldrin, who got the idea from a family member who felt the genre would have a broad reach. Aldrin’s ShareSpace Foundation, which promotes science and exploration, is one of three beneficiaries of the song’s iTunes sales. “I want kids interested in space. It’s their future”….[Aldrin] says rapping with Snoop Dogg proved almost as daunting as space. “Snoop had this great hand language going as he sang, which was hard for me,” Aldrin says. “But when it comes to getting people’s attention, comedy goes a long way.”
When Julian Asher hears a violin, he sees red wine. However, this Imperial College London professor isn’t crazy: One out of every thousand people is said to experience this neurological condition called synesthesia. It causes two senses to blend together, so that stimulation of one sense triggers an entirely different one, involuntarily and simultaneously.
Here’s a theory on how it works: When one region of a person’s brain talks with another region that is wired to perceive a certain sense, the pathways cross and allow the person to experience “crossed senses.” Synesthesia is different for everyone who has it— some people claim they can smell a sound, while others hear a color, and some can even “taste” words.
The latest research on the topic has come out of Oxford University, where scientists found that people hear low-pitched sounds when they see large, round images. Experimental psychologist Charles Spence asked twelve “non-synesthetes” if they could identify whether an image or tone came first, in order to see how “soft” or “sharp” sounds registered in their brains. The volunteers associated high-pitched sound with angular shapes, and recognized low-pitched sounds when they were shown large dots.
On the off chance that you’ve ever had a yearning to hear what Neanderthal music sounded like—assuming you’ve even considered whether they made music—you should absolutely click here to hear a sample of jazz composer Simon Thorne’s 75-minute-long reimagining of Neanderthal music. If you have the patience to listen to the nonsensical beginning, then you’ll get a chance to enjoy the ancient-style chanting towards the end. Thorne initially thought it would be impossible to imagine what Neanderthals listened to, but he took on the unusual project and did his best to create a song that would evoke sounds from a Neanderthal’s life.
While the National Museum Wales commissioned the song to accompany an exhibit featuring Neanderthal tools and teeth, it might actually serve a bigger purpose in knocking down the misconception that Neanderthals were dumber than early Homo sapiens. Thorne told the BBC, “Every culture has language and music, so we can probably assume that [Neanderthals] had some kind of music too.”
Later this year, the music will be performed live when four singers with stone instruments go on tour. Can you say, “Rock on”?
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
ABC News 
Meet 
The moon has a bumpy, pitted surface; in fact, it’s vaguely similar to the ridges of an old-fashioned vinyl record. So why not use the moon to make some melodies?
It’s no secret that something mysterious is 
When Julian Asher 
On the off chance that you’ve ever had a yearning to hear what Neanderthal music sounded like—assuming you’ve even considered whether they made music—you should absolutely click 
