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 [...]

SONG: “Evert 1 Pipkin”.

ARTIST: grant. Originally by Man or Astro-Man?

SOURCE: This is a penitential cover. It’s not from any specific scientific study… although the original may have come from space. You can hear it here, or just buy the Made From Technetium album and be happy.

ABSTRACT: This song is brilliant and deserves [...]

Researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University are using music (and audio engineering) to treat pain and depression – by mapping out emotional terrain in pop songs:

Each volunteer listens to pieces of previously unheard contemporary popular music* and assigns each one a position on a graph. One axis measures the type of feeling (positivity or negativity) that the piece communicates; [...]

The BBC has a simulation of the sound of the Higgs boson.

That’s what the harmonics of the mass-bearing subatomic particle will sound like if one really does turn up at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s what matter sounded like when it was coming into being.

Fixing the BBC’s headline here (and wife??) while celebrating a new, high frequency project by Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, dog musicians:

US rock star Lou Reed and his artist wife Laurie Anderson are to stage a “high-frequency concert” for canines in Australia.

Music for Dogs, to be held outside the Sydney Opera House, is billed as “an inter-species social [...]

Chasing the links for that Levitin interview yesterday, I found this call for volunteers in a musical experiment:

MacCullum’s computer program creates a randomly generated pair of “Adam and Eve” “songs”–brief loops of sound. They mutate, recombine and reproduce to form a base population of 100 descendants.

Participants act as the force of natural selection by listening to the songs and [...]

Unlike all of the other selections cut-n-pasted here, this one I typed in by hand; that’s how much I wanted to share it. It’s from Tape Op, the free audio recordists’ magazine that you should already be reading. The Nov/Dec issue features a great interview with Dr. Daniel Levitin, a neurological researcher, musician and audio engineer who [...]

About two months ago, the BBC tells us, Scottish researchers used computer models to bring a lost medieval instrument back to life:

Bach’s motet (a choral musical composition) “O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht” was one of the last pieces of music written for the Lituus.

Now, for the first time, this 18th Century composition has been played as it [...]

Normally I wouldn’t encourage this sort of thing, but NOVA has an interesting feature explaining how Autotune works.

On July 6, they’ll be posting answers to viewers’ questions emailed to Harold “Dr. Andy” Hildebrand, the man who invented the software.

Which is, I’ll admit, an awesome technical feat. Despite what his creation has become.