For her master’s thesis at MIT, a Anita Lillie developed MusicBox – an interesting application designed to visually map out your music collection. 

MusicBox analyzes the meta data of your music and categories the music based on a variety of attributes. Using this information, it creates a visual map of your music, which you can use to navigate your collection. Check out the MusicBox demo above to see it in action.

Here’s a screen shot showing the main features within MusicBox:

Lillie hopes to make a simplified version of MusicBox for the iPhone. You can get the full scoop on MusicBox from Lillie’s thesis (pdf).

What do you think – does MusicBox’s approach to navigating your digital music collection seem like a useful advance?

via TJ at Califaudio

This is a little off topic, but it’s fascinating research that could have applications for music. Chris Harrison, a PhD Student, is researching using sound and gestures to turn any surface into an input device.

Here’s the summary of his project:

Scratch Input: Creating Large, Inexpensive, Unpowered and Mobile Finger Input Surfaces

We present Scratch Input, an acoustic-based input technique that relies on the unique sound produced when a fingernail is dragged over the surface of a textured material, such as wood, fabric, or wall paint. We employ a simple sensor that can be easily coupled with existing surfaces, such as walls and tables, turning them into large, unpowered and ad hoc finger input surfaces. Our sensor is sufficiently small that it could be incorporated into a mobile device, allowing any suitable surface on which it rests to be appropriated as a gestural input surface. Several example applications were developed to demonstrate possible interactions. We conclude with a study that shows users can perform six Scratch Input gestures at about 90% accuracy with less than five minutes of training and on wide variety of surfaces.

While this is still very experimental, it’s easy to imagine using microphones like this to very cheaply turn surfaces into giant controllers for electronic music.

via Procrastineering, via Hackaday

If his research is to be believed, Dance Music fans are creative, outgoing and “not gentle”.

Meow! I think he nailed this study!

Other personality/music links:

• Jazz - High self-esteem, creative, outgoing and at ease
• Country - Hardworking, outgoing
• Indie - Low self-esteem, creative, not hard working, not gentle
• Heavy Metal - Low self-esteem, creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, at ease

North interviewed 36,000 people in order to come up with these results.

Interesting stuff, but I’d rather know if Aphex Twin fans are really closet homicidal maniacs.

Let me know what you think of this research in the comments!

via the BBC

Image: lamazone

If you’ve ever wondered how pictures of you French-kissing a giant chicken ended up on Flickr, you’ll be glad to know there’s a scientific explanation: bars use loud dance music to get you drunk.

A study to be published in Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research on the effects of music levels on drinking in bars found that loud music makes you drink more in less time.

Scientists randomly varied the volume level of music played in bars, and then observed how frequently patrons ordered drinks. They found that high sound levels led to increased drinking, within a decreased amount of time.

Gueguen and his colleagues offered two hypotheses for why this may have occurred.

“One, in agreement with previous research on music, food and drink, high sound levels may have caused higher arousal, 7hich led the subjects to drink faster and to order more drinks,” said Gueguen. “Two, loud music may have had a negative effect ‘n social interaction in the bar$ so that patrons drank more bec!use they talked less.”

“This is the first time that an exper!mental approach in a real conte t found the effects of loud mus!c on alcohol consumption,”said $ead investigator Nicolas Guegue&.”

So next time you’re at a ar, some great music comes on a&d you find yourself ordering an/ther drink, it’s probably the r%sult of some barroom science.

This is a demonstration video showing real-time 3D acoustic rendering, using the Phoenix gaming engine.

Developer David Rosen discusses this in depth in his paper Real-time 3D Acoustics Rendering:

Abstract

It is common for real-time systems to render 3D sounds by simply panning the sound from left to right and adjusting the volume based on distance. This is a good start, but ignores many effects that contribute to our perception of sounds and the acoustic environment. First, we must take into account the time it takes for the sound to travel from the source to each receiver (e.g. the left and right ear). Second, ears are not omnidirectional microphones; sounds can be occluded by the head and by the ear itself, and different frequency bands can be affected in different ways by this occlusion. Finally, sound sources can be occluded by objects in the environment, and the sound can reflect off of surfaces, or reverberate within spaces. In this paper we describe an efficient way to simulate all of these phenomena in real time.

If you’re interested in this stuff, give the paper a read. There are explosions involved.

Rosen’s a game developer, but this technology seems like it would be an interesting area of development for audio/visual synthesis.

Can you imagine entering into a 3D world of ambient sound-objects, where your perspective, and the location of the objects, affects what you hear?

via Califaudio

Scientists have proven, with science, that wine tastes better with powerful, heavy music.

So, if you like your techno with some fava beans and a nice chianti, there may be a reason.

“It is widely acknowledged within the scientific community that music affects behaviour,” according to Prof Adrian North of Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. “However, this is the first time it has been scientifically proven that music can affect perception in other senses and change the way wine tastes.

“The research showed that when a powerful, heavy piece of music is heard, a wine such as Cabernet Sauvignon is perceived as being 60 per cent more powerful, rich and robust than when no music is heard,” he adds.

Some would argue that everything is more intense with some powerful, heavy music!

The research in the department of applied psychology was based on cognitive priming theory, which suggests that music stimulates specific areas of the brain. When wine is tasted, these areas of the brain are already active and prime the listener to taste the wine in a corresponding way.

“I love the idea that music has such an enormous effect on the way we taste wine,” said David Williams, editor of Wine and Spirit magazine. “Maybe one day there will even be music lists in Michelin starred restaurants.”

Image: thefuturistics

It’s science: chill out music music is good for you

According to research presented at the American Society of Hypertension’s Twenty Third Annual Scientific Meeting and Exposition (ASH 2008), listening to just 30 minutes of rhythmically homogeneous music every day can significantly reduce high blood pressure.

By rhythmically homogeneous, they mean music with little or no variation in rhythm; they tested with classical music and Indian raga music, but the research offers some medical validation to Stephen Halpern’s pioneering new age music, Brian Eno’s ambient music (which he conceived while bed-ridden) and more recent chill out music.

Researchers found that patients with mild hypertension who listened to just half an hour rhythmically homogeneous music a day for four weeks experienced significant reductions in 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure (ABP)

“Listening to music is soothing and has often been associated with controlling patient-reported pain or anxiety and acutely reducing blood pressure,” said study investigator, Prof. Pietro A. Modesti, MD, PhD. “But for the first time, today’s results clearly illustrate the impact daily music listening has on ABP. We …. can now confidently explore music listening as a safe, effective, non-pharmacological treatment option or a complement to therapy.”

Unfortunately, the research was limited to  testing the positive benefits of “soothing” music, so we can’t tell if listening to techno is just as beneficial, or if it’s likely to send your heart into a hypertensive spasm.

Research Details

Hypertension is a common disorder in which blood pressure remains abnormally high (a reading of 140/90 mm Hg or greater) and is responsible for causing at least five million premature deaths each year worldwide

A total of 48 patients aged between 45 and 70, all with mild hypertension and using pharmacological treatment, took part in the study. Of these, 28 patients aged between 45 and 69, listened to 30 minutes of classical, Celtic and Indian (raga) music per day while conducting slow, controlled abdominal breathing exercises. Twenty patients of comparable age, blood pressure values and antihypertensive treatment served as the control group. All patients underwent ABP monitoring before randomization (baseline) and one and four weeks after treatment allocation.

The study results revealed a significant systolic ABP reduction in those patients who had been listening to music daily (-3.2±5.6 and -4.4±5.3 mm Hg, p<0.01 vs baseline for both) at one and four weeks respectively. Only small, non significant BP reductions were revealed via 24-hour monitoring of the control group. The effect on systolic blood pressure was independent from changes in heart rate because no differences between groups were observed in 24-hour mean heart rate.

“Sadly, despite the global focus on prevention, it predicted that 56 billion people worldwide will be hypertensive by 2025,” said Modesti. “In light of these devastating statistics, it is reassuring to consider that something as simple, easy and enjoyable as daily music listening combined with slow abdominal breathing, may help people naturally lower their blood pressure.”

Image: KristenV

Mathtrek has an interesting post that explores the geometry of music.

According to Dmitri Tymoczko, a composer and music theorist at Princeton University…to grasp the true structure of music, we need to understand the geometry of hyperdimensional objects.

Tymoczko compares the structure of music to the shape of a rock face that a rock-climber is scrambling up. “If you know the conditions of the rock face, you can predict the motions of the climber,” he says. “The structure of the space makes certain choices overwhelmingly natural or convenient. There’s something similar that goes on with music. When you think about things abstractly, you can come to understand that the directions that music went aren’t completely arbitrary. Composers are exploring the possibilities that musical space presents them with.”

Tymoczko built on familiar geometrical analogs for music. For example, musical pitch is often imagined as lying on a line with low notes to the left and high notes to the right. Furthermore, as pitches go higher and higher, the notes repeat in different octaves, such that a low C, a middle C, and a high C all sound very similar. Often, the exact octave of a particular note doesn’t matter very much in music. Instead, musicians commonly visualize a “pitch class circle,” which comes from the original line by gluing together each point of the line that represents the same note in different octaves. So low C, middle C, and high C, for example, would all be glued together.

Applying the same kind of reasoning to complete pieces of music, Tymoczko created a geometric space in which he could analyze a piece of music with two notes being played simultaneously. He started with a piece of paper and made the horizontal direction represent the pitch of one note and the vertical direction represent the pitch of the other. A piece of music with two voices would correspond to dots moving around in this space.

Then he modified the space to embed musical structure within it. First, Tymoczko used the same method musicians used to create the pitch circle. He glued the left edge of the page to the right edge, turning the horizontal lines into circles and creating a cylinder from the whole page. Then he glued the bottom end of the cylinder to the top, turning the vertical lines into circles as well and creating a donut shape from the entire page.

Next, he noted that the order of the notes in a chord doesn’t much matter. That means that the point on his page that has C in the horizontal direction and E in the vertical direction is really the same as the point that has E in the horizontal direction and C in the vertical direction. So he took his space and glued all those points together. It takes a bit of effort to visualize it, but for two simultaneous notes, this turns the donut shape into a Möbius strip.

Music theorists have long found Chopin’s E minor prelude puzzling. , Although the chord progressions sound smooth to the ear, they don’t quite follow the traditional rules of harmony. When Tymoczko looked at the piece and watched the composition’s motion through his geometrical space, he saw that Chopin was moving in a systematic way among the different layers of the four-dimensional cubes. “It’s almost as if he’s an improviser with a set of rules and set of constraints,” Tymoczko says.

Another way of visualizing Chopin’s composition is through a three-dimensional projection of a four-dimensional space, as in the video above. The chords primarily cluster in the center of the space, usually moving through small distances.

I’m not sure if I”M convinced by some of Tymoczko’s assertions – but his work offers an interesting way of visualizing relationships in music.

When the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music, according to Dale Purves, Professor for Research in Neurobiology.

The researchers tested their idea by recording native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers uttering vowel sounds in both single words and a series of short monologues. They then compared the vocal frequency ratios to the numerical ratios that define notes in music. The speech sounds produced by different speakers and languages produce the same variety of vocal tract resonance ratios, Purves said.

The lowest two of these vocal tract resonances, also known as formants, account for the vowel sounds in speech. “Take away the first two formants and you can’t understand what a person is saying,” Purves said.

The frequency of the first formant is between 200 and 1,000 cycles per second (hertz) and the second formant between 800 and 3,000 hertz. The researchers looked at the ratios of the first two formants in speech spectra and found that the ratios formed musical relationships.

“In about 70 percent of the speech sounds, these ratios were bang-on musical intervals,” Purves said. “This predominance of musical intervals hidden in speech suggests that the chromatic scale notes in music sound right to our ears because they match the formant ratios we are exposed to all the time in speech, even though we are quite unaware of this exposure.”
Purves and his collaborators also think these findings may help explain a centuries-old debate in music over which tuning scheme for instruments works best. Ten of the 12 harmonic intervals identified in English and Mandarin speech occur in “just intonation” tuning. They found fewer correspondences in other tuning systems, including the equal temperament tuning commonly used today.

via Huliq