Wired reveals the weird ways nanotechnologists are making sound behave like light… this time, by creating a Star Trek weapon in the lab:

Because laser is an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” these new contraptions – which exploit particles of sound called phonons – should properly be called phasers. Such devices could one day be [...]

Nature explores the strange mathematics of yuck – the neurological reason why we find dissonant music hard to listen to:

Consonant chords are, roughly speaking, made up of notes that ‘sound good’ together, like middle C and the G above it (an interval called a fifth). Dissonant chords are combinations that sound jarring, like middle C and the C [...]

I’m not sure when this happened, but NOAA thinks they’ve finally identified the mysterious underwater sound known as ‘The Bloop’:

The broad spectrum sounds recorded in the summer of 1997 are consistent with icequakes generated by large icebergs as they crack and fracture. NOAA hydrophones deployed in the Scotia Sea detected numerous icequakes with spectrograms very similar to “Bloop”.

You [...]

Fun to read Sound on Sound’s behind-the-mixing-board analysis of what made “Somebody That I Used To Know” so darn catchy – even though it breaks some Top-40 rules:

The song’s mixer, François Tétaz, had a vision for it from the beginning. He also thought long and hard about aspects of the mix that are likely to have greatly contributed to [...]

BBC reveals a Japanese project that combines biology, engineering and beauty – spinning violin strings out of spider silk:

Shigeyoshi Osaki of Japan’s Nara Medical University has been interested in the mechanical properties of spider silk for a number of years.

In particular, he has studied the “dragline” silk that spiders dangle from, quantifying its strength in a 2007 [...]

Technology Review cuts out all the chatter with their lowdown on an honest-to-God silence ray:

Today, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tskuba and Koji Tsukada at Ochanomizu University, both in Japan, present a radical solution: a speech-jamming device that forces recalcitrant speakers into submission.

The idea is simple. Psychologists have known for [...]

Not new research, but I just learned that the lowest note in the Universe:

The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster. These ripples are evidence for sound waves that have traveled hundreds [...]

That’s how The Telegraph puts it. “Boffins” (a lovely word) helped the band Marconi Union design a song so relaxing, you shouldn’t put it on your car stereo:

Dr David Lewis-Hodgson, from Mindlab International, which conducted the research, said: “The results clearly show that the track induced the greatest relaxation – higher than any of the other music tested.

“Brain [...]

Science explores why the noise of nails on a chalkboard is so awful:

As they will report next week at the Acoustical Society of America conference in San Diego, California, [Michael Oehler of the Macromedia University for Media and Communication in Cologne, Germany, and Christoph Reuter of the University of Vienna] found that a listener’s skin conductivity changed significantly [...]