Sound is something of an ephemeral phenomenon, existing in the moment that vibrations travel through the air. Those vibrations also exhibit distinct patterns, depending on frequency, which can be ...

(Inside Science) -- You are sitting in a concert hall about to hear Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, anticipating, among other things, the famous first four notes. When it comes, it sounds just like you ...

Ever since ancient times, scholars have puzzled over the reasons that some musical note combinations sound so sweet while others are just downright dreadful. The Greeks believed that simple ratios in ...

In Western styles of music, from classical to pop, some combinations of notes are generally considered more pleasant than others. To most of our ears, a two-note chord of C and G, for example, sounds ...

When two notes are an octave apart, one has double the frequency of the other yet we perceive them as being the same note – a “C” for example. Why is this? Readers give their take This question has a ...

Our experience of musical intervals and the uncanny “sameness” of octaves is encoded in our neuroanatomy. The neuroscience of music is rich, complex and not without controversy. But some things are ...

[Stanislaw Pusep] has gifted us with the Pianolizer project – an easy-to-use toolkit for music exploration and visualization, an audio spectrum analyzer helping you turn sounds into piano notes. You ...

Western ears consider a pitch at double the frequency of a lower pitch to be the same note, an octave higher. The Tsimane’, an indigenous people in the Bolivian Amazon basin, do not. “If you only test ...