Music Science

Dubstep artist Skrillex could protect against mosquito bites
Aug 2019, BBC News

Mosquitos use low frequencies to have sex, or to find mates. Something about bass drops and mosquito sex. When you interfere, or add noise to this frequency, it can entrain them, or hypnotize them, because they are so sensitive to it. They get hypnotized and don't sting as much.

Why music makes us feel, according to AI
Nov 2019, phys.org

Contrast made this one part of the brain light up a lot, like a change in loudness, or introduction of a new instrument. "Dynamic variability".

In fact, for each new instrument, there was a spike in palm sweat (aka galvanic skin response).

But the most stimulating moments happened from heightened complexity; as you add more instruments and as you approach crescendo, you experience the whole autonomic response on at the highest level.

And emotional response?

"That award goes to the raised 7th note of the minor scale. The study found the note F# in a song in the G minor key positively correlated with high sadness ratings.
-A Multimodal View into Music's Effect on Human Neural, Physiological, and Emotional Experience

image source: Jason Mowry, Black and Green Music Equalizer

Post Script
Chimpanzees spontaneously dance to music
Dec 2019, phys.org

"dance-like music" (?)

Rachmaninoff the most innovative composer according to network science
Feb 2020, phys.org

Comparing Western and Chinese classical music using deep learning algorithms
Mar 2020, phys.org

"While previous music studies mainly use models based on music, we were curious about whether a model trained on general soundscape can be used for analyzing music and how they are different for Chinese and Western classical music," Fan explained. "Therefore, we tried using two models built on general sound: a sound event detection model and a soundscape emotion recognition model."
...
The researchers also observed that their deep learning classifier recognized soundscape recordings as Chinese classical music. This suggests that soundscape recordings typically share more similarities with Chinese classical music than with Western classical music.

Mozart may reduce seizure frequency in people with epilepsy

June 2020, phys.org

aka the new CBD

Fake It til You Make It

Bordo - Chinese Graffiti

It sounds like what they're saying here is that people don't want science, they want bad science. I should rephrase - money doesn't want good science, but people do. Social science in particular, is in a bit of a pickle these days (see the replication crisis).

This also sounds a lot like the word of the year for 2016, post-truth, related to 'truthiness' and referencing a world where emotional reaction has more traction that cold hard facts. This is something we've always known, albeit at times in our cultural unconscious. We make things that fight this, I'm sure people like Bejamin Franklin, newspaper editor, had something to say about it. But our defenses have been lacking, and could use a rethink.

Here from The Guardian:

Smaldino cites an experiment by the American psychologist Daryl Bem, who purported to show that undergraduates could predict the future and published the result in a prestigious journal.

"What he found was the equivalent of flipping a bunch of pennies, nickels, and quarters, asking students to guess heads or tails each time, and then reporting that psychic abilities exist for pennies, but not nickels and quarters, because the students were right 53% of the time for the pennies, rather than the expected 50%. It’s insane,” said Smaldino. “Bem used exactly the same standards of evidence that all social psychologists were using to evaluate their findings. And if those standards allowed this ridiculous a hypothesis to make the cut, imagine what else was getting through.”

Cut-throat academia leads to 'natural selection of bad science', claims study
The Guardian, Sep 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/cut-throat-academia-leads-to-natural-selection-of-bad-science-claims-study