Heady Music

Science Daily reports on custom music made from your brainwaves, a project sponsored by Dept of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate to help emergency response workers achieve "relaxed" states and "alert" states by listening to music composed by algorithmically processing their brain states.

To put it simply:
Your brain makes noise. The project then translates that noise into what we call "music." The researchers are betting that by feeding that music back to you, it will reenact the mental state your brain was in when it first made the noise.

You can listen to a clip of the "Alert" music here.

That's not music!

An intriguing article has just been published in Science Blogs discussing the first time isolated non-western cultures have heard western music. Natives of the Mafa culture were able to correctly distinguish the emotion portrayed by an unfamiliar culture's music. This was consistently done at percentages signifigantly higher than random chance. Of the most interest is the audio clips of the Mafa's traditional music, as compared to the audio clips of the Western music which was played for them.

Take two measures and call me in the morning...

The New York Times reports on Vera Brandes, the director of the research program in music and medicine at the Paracelsus Private Medical University in Salzburg. Vera is taking a very interesting approach to the health benefits of music involving specific playlist prescriptions for her patients. While the article "Musical Pharmacology" doesn't go into too many specifics, (I'd love to see a research paper!) it does cover Vera's general approach.

Worth a quick read on a sunday afternoon.