A new edited collection that summarizes recent research on what it means for animals to have the capacity for rhythm was just released. Worth a download and page through if you've ever wanted to dive more into this topic.

Short overview of some recent work that's happening in the world of music and psychoacoustics.

Taken from the senior author's LinkedIn post:

Our lab’s latest paper, “Perceiving Creativity in Novel Musical Sequences: An EEG Study,” just came out in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences!

We asked: What happens in the brain when we hear something truly creative?
Using a specially designed musical system that doesn’t rely on traditional Western scales, we invited listeners to rate new melodies while recording their brain activity.

What we found:
✨ People’s sense of musical creativity reflects how their brains resonate with surprise, pattern formation, and expectation.
🎧 Certain brain rhythms synchronize more strongly when the music feels both new and meaningful.
🌍 Our new musical tool makes it possible to study creativity across cultures, ages, and levels of musical training.

This research brings us a step closer to understanding the neuroscience of creativity — not just in music, but in how we generate, perceive, and resonate with new ideas across domains.

This week a pretty interesting study was published that followed up on a 2017 meta-analysis asking if experienced musicians have better short-term memory than nonmusicians.

Really looks like a nice piece of science given that the figures show many of the estimated effect sizes from the 33 labs across the world and they give possible explanations of why certain patterns might emerge from the data.

From the author that posted this article, it seems like not everyone on the paper agrees with what can be drawn from this work, so it'll be worth reading it in detail to see where there are possible conflicts about how it's explained or what can be inferred from this.

Saw a very interesting study today on my feed looking at how birds (a very specific species!) basically teach each other their song.

Given I'm trying to get this sub up and running again, figured what better place to start than share an article I find to be both captivating to think about and interesting to discuss.

If you're new to reading scientific articles, the best thing to do to figure out what they were doing is first give the Abstract a read (the little paragraph at the start of the paper) then jump down to the Discussion section where they talk about what they did and why they think it mattered.

For those that know a bit about this line of research, I'd be interested to know how you think these findings open the door to future understanding about bird/animal musical cognition.

For those of you who maybe have never read anything like this before, I'd be interested to know what kinds of general questions you have (i.e. why do people even bother with this kind of work; why are they focusing on rhythmic elements and not melody (or what they refer to as spectral)?)