A new study co-authored by Prof. Josh McDermott finds that musical preference may stem from cultural origins, writes Vivian Wang for The Boston Globe. “It raises the possibility that things vary a lot more from culture to culture than people might have wanted to accept,” says McDermott.
A paper co-authored by Prof. Josh McDermott examines the musical preferences of a society with minimal exposure to Western culture, writes Chelsea Leu for Wired. “Maybe an innate bias for consonance exists, but that doesn’t mean every culture develops it,” Leu writes regarding the society’s lack of preference for consonant or dissonant sounds.
By studying how people from different cultures respond to consonant and dissonant chords, MIT researchers have found that musical tastes may be rooted in cultural origins, not biology, writes Sarah Kaplan for The Washington Post. The results “underscore the degree of variation that exists across cultures in terms of how people hear and evaluate music," explains Prof. Josh McDermott.
Atlantic reporter Ed Young writes about a study by MIT researchers that finds musical preferences may be cultural in origin. The researchers examined the musical preferences of remote Amazonian village and found they “don’t care about consonance or dissonance. They can tell the difference between the two kinds of sounds, but they rate both as being equally pleasant.”
A new study by MIT researchers finds that culture and not biology may be responsible for our musical tastes, writes Amina Khan for The Los Angeles Times. The researchers found that “people who haven’t been exposed to Western music don’t find certain ‘discordant’ sounds unpleasant at all,” suggesting that musical preferences are not innate.
Jordan Graham of the Boston Herald writes that the Open Music Initiative - a new collaboration between MIT, Berklee College of Music, and the music industry - will create a new standard method of calculating and tracking how artists, rights holders, music labels, and distributors get paid in the internet era.
Andrea Shea reports for WBUR that researchers from the MIT Media Lab and the Berklee College of Music have started a new initiative aimed at tackling ownership, licensing and distribution rights within the music industry. Shea explains that the initiative is focused on “laying the groundwork for a shared, open database of ownership rights.”
Boston Globe reporter David Weininger writes about “Persona,” a new opera by Prof. Jay Scheib and Prof. Keeril Makan, based on a 1966 Ingmar Bergman film. The opera is staged as if the action is being filmed, which allows viewers to be “more involved with what’s happening than I think they’re expecting,” explains Makan.
A study by MIT researchers illustrates how the brain responds to music, writes Jill Suttie for The Huffington Post. "You want to know what is it about bluegrass music that makes it sound like bluegrass? We think that finding this neural population will help us to answer that question going forward,” explains postdoc Sam Norman-Haignere.
New York Times reporter Natalie Angier writes that MIT researchers have identified regions of the brain that react to music. “Why do we have music? Why do we enjoy it so much and want to dance when we hear it?” says Prof. Nancy Kanwisher. “These are the really cool first-order questions we can begin to address.”
Natalie Angier of The New York Times chronicles her experience having her brain scanned as part of an MIT experiment that reveled the pathways in the brain that respond to music. Angier writes that, “the neuroscience of music is just getting started, and our brains can’t help but stay tuned.”
Prof. Evan Ziporyn organized and conducted a tribute concert in honor of David Bowie. Boston Globe writer Matthew Guerrieri described the concert as “heartfelt, celebratory, just freewheeling enough.”
Prof. Tod Machover writes about the work of French composer Pierre Boulez, who died January 5, in an article for The Wall Street Journal. “[Boulez] has left a legacy as a bold fighter for the seriousness, sophistication and transformative power of music at a moment when we have often forgotten how…to really listen,” writes Machover.
MIT researchers have identified the region of the brain that perceives music, reports Emily Reynolds for Wired. The researchers found that one area of the brain “responded most to music, another to speech, and the other four to different acoustic properties such as pitch and frequency.”
In this AP TV video, Prof. Tod Machover discusses the development of his latest work, “Symphony in D,” a piece about the city of Detroit. “I really wanted it to be a portrait of the city so I invited everybody in the city, anybody who wanted to, to collaborate,” says Machover.