PLoS ONE presents research on music and words, showing that, no matter what language you use, speaking an emotion uses the same sounds as playing an emotion:

In Western music, the major mode is typically used to convey excited, happy, bright or martial emotions, whereas the minor mode typically conveys subdued, sad or dark emotions. Recent studies indicate that the [...]

Slate has a great piece on why the piano we hear now ain’t the instrument great composers wrote on – and how that changes the best known tunes in history:

But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn’t just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can’t even be played as written on [...]

You’ve got to read this story.

OK, not monkeys, but apes, New Scientist says, have been caught making musical instruments:

The orang-utan’s music, if you can call it that, is actually an alarm call known as a “kiss squeak”.

“When you’re walking the forest and you meet an orang-utan that not habituated to humans, they’ll start giving kiss squeaks and breaking branches,” says Madeleine Hardus, a [...]

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 [...]

The New York Times reports on a German discovery – or, really, a whole set of discoveries – of Stone Age tools, sculptures and the oldest known flutes:

Dr. Conard, a professor of archaeology, said in an e-mail message from Germany that “the new flutes must be very close to 40,000 calendar years old and certainly date to the initial [...]

Scientific American casts a cold eye on music makers, and clinically reveals that yes, music really matters:

To record brain stem responses, the researchers placed electrodes on the heads of 30 people who were either musicians or non-musicians. The electrodes measured the electric currents that send signals through the brain stem, while the participants listened to an infant’s unhappy cry.

The [...]

CNN recently covered some fun physiological research from the University of Maryland that showed that music – music you like – really is good for your heart:

Miller thought, if laughter can do that, why not music? So, he tested the effects of music on the cardiovascular system. “Turns out music may be one of the best de-stressors — [...]

Scientific American presents a scathing indictment of my forebears as it reveals a link between genetics and musicality:

In what the researchers called the first study of its kind, they found specific regions of chromosomes that were connected to musical ability. The report appeared in the Journal of Medical Genetics.

The subjects were 234 members of several generations of 15 [...]