Megamusicals have often been criticised in the academic world and in the media for their homogenizing tendencies, but increasing academic attention on them is providing us with new insights. In her inaugural lecture at the University of Amsterdam, professor by special appointment of the Musical Millie Taylor will outline the impact of megamusicals on local...
When Ludwig von Beethoven died in 1827, he was three years removed from the completion of his Ninth Symphony, a work heralded by many as his magnum opus. He had started work on his 10th Symphony but, due to deteriorating health, wasn’t able to make much headway: All he left behind were some musical sketches....
As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe in 2020, musicians around the world were desperate for the answers to two pressing questions: Can playing musical instruments transmit COVID-19? And if so, what can be done? Now, halfway through 2021, the first official research results are in—and it’s good news: The show can go on. Published...
Music artists can find inspiration and new creative directions for their song writing with technology developed by Waterloo researchers. LyricJam, a real-time system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to generate lyric lines for live instrumental music, was created by members of the University’s Natural Language Processing Lab. The lab, led by Olga Vechtomova, a Waterloo Engineering...
Musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton are considered virtuosos, guitarists who could make their instruments sing. Drummers in west Africa who play hourglass-shaped percussion instruments called dùndúns can make their instrument not only sing, but talk. New research published in the journal Frontiers in Communication is one of the first to show the high degree...
A team of researchers from Graz University of Technology, Know-Center GmbH, Johannes Kepler University Linz, University of Innsbruck, Austria and University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, compared how accurate algorithm-generated music recommendations were for mainstream and non-mainstream music listeners. They used a dataset containing the listening histories of 4,148 users of the music streaming platform Last.fm...
Bands and artists on independent record labels get less than their fair share of access to the most popular playlists on streaming platforms such as Spotify – argues a new paper from the University of East Anglia. The paper looks at whether streaming platforms offer a level playing field for artists and record labels. It finds...
Forty years ago, on Nov. 30, 1979, the English progressive rock band Pink Floyd released its 11th studio album, “The Wall.” Featuring 26 tracks, two records and an opera-esque story line, the concept album would go on to become the number two bestselling double album in history. But it would also mark the last time...
In a new paper, a team of University of Southern California (USC) computer scientists and psychologists teamed up to investigate how music affects how you act, feel and think Your heart beats faster, palms sweat and part of your brain called the Heschl’s gyrus lights up like a Christmas tree. Chances are, you’ve never thought...
Popular music has changed over the years, and the music of 2019 is noticeably different from the music of the 1960s or 1970s. But it is not just the music that changed, but also the lyrics. Data scientists at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan used quantitative analytics to study the change in lyrics of popular...
