Music

Two years of experimentation taught a Nashville guitarist not every musical myth makes sense

Songs and speech across cultures suggest music developed similar features around the world

What can singing tell us about how we’re wired—and how our ancestors evolved?

The musical Lifeline tells the story of Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of antibiotics, as these revolutionary drugs continue to lose their efficacy

Simple cues help people to distinguish song from the spoken word

The “Raygun” Olympics fiasco points to how hip-hop scholarship is at risk of being colonized and undermined in academia

Both expertise and the ability to release one’s focus can help people enter a state of effortless attention

Across the globe, singing traditions are vast and varied. Their commonalities may help explain how music evolved

An assessment of hundreds of thousands of songs confirms that choruses and hooks have taken over—but simpler isn’t necessarily worse

Physicists found that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach contains mathematical patterns that help convey information

If holiday music seems designed in a lab to get stuck on repeat inside your head for all of December, well, it kind of is

Birds might sing in the morning because they need a vocal workout