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A new study has found that dopamine — a neurotransmitter that plays an important role in our cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functioning — plays a direct role in the reward experience induced by music. The new findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“In everyday life, humans regularly seek participation in highly complex and pleasurable experiences such as music listening, singing, or playing, that do not seem to have any specific survival advantage. Understanding how the brain translates a structured sequence of sounds, such as music, into a pleasant and rewarding experience is thus a challenging and fascinating question,” said study author Laura Ferreri, an associate professor in cognitive psychology at Lyon University.

“In the scientific literature, there was a lack of direct evidence showing that dopamine function is causally related to music-evoked pleasure. Therefore in this study, through a pharmacological approach, we wanted to investigate whether dopamine, which plays a major role in regulating pleasure experiences and motivation to engage in certain behaviors, plays a direct role in the experience of pleasure induced by music.”

Continue reading “Listening to the music you love will make your brain release more dopamine, study finds” »

The part of your brain responsible for ASMR catalogs music, and appears to be a stronghold against Alzheimer’s and dementia.

The texture of an artist’s original work can now be reproduced with AI-controlled 3D printing.

Spectroscopy reveals there’s more to art than what meets the eye.

Now researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in South Korea have made a nanomembrane out of silver nanowires to serve as flexible loudspeakers or microphones. The researchers even went so far as to demonstrate their nanomembrane by making it into a loudspeaker that could be attached to skin and used it to play the final movement of a violin concerto—namely, La Campanella by Niccolo Paganini.

Researchers in South Korea made a tiny loudspeaker, and then used it to play a violin concerto.

Continue reading “Flexible Loudspeaker Made of Nanowires Will Stick to Your Skin and Play Music” »

Researchers at the University of Waterloo, Canada, have recently developed a system for generating song lyrics that match the style of particular music artists. Their approach, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, uses a variational autoencoder (VAE) with artist embeddings and a CNN classifier trained to predict artists from MEL spectrograms of their song clips.

“The motivation for this project came from my personal interest,” Olga Vechtomova, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Music is a passion of mine, and I was curious about whether a machine can generate lines that sound like the lyrics of my favourite music artists. While working on text generative models, my research group found that neural networks can generate some impressive lines of text. The natural next step for us was to explore whether a machine could learn the ‘essence’ of a specific music artist’s lyrical style, including choice of words, themes and sentence structure, to generate novel lyrics lines that sound like the artist in question.”

The system developed by Vechtomova and her colleagues is based on a neural network model called variational autoencoder (VAE), which can learn by reconstructing original lines of text. In their study, the researchers trained their model to generate any number of new, diverse and coherent lyric lines.

Continue reading “A system to generate new song lyrics that match the style of specific artists” »

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Probably my biggest regret when I made the Hubble Deep Field in 3D video is saying the phrase “these galaxies are racing away from us, in some cases faster than light”.

Continue reading “How Can Galaxies Travel Faster Than Light?” »

What is UBI? How would free money change our lives.

Kurzgesagt Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/cRUQxz

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For the most serious devotees, immortality-seeking is a full-time commitment to keeping abreast of the latest innovations—they speak of these “modalities” with the same reverence a Christian would of a blessing. A $250 billion industry of antiaging products and services is there for the collection—and many of their offerings are for sale at RAADfest.

Ivan Apers, center, surrounded by participants in the RAAD Challenge, a yearlong health and fitness regimen culminating at RAADfest. Members showed off their results with a choreographed workout set to music.

This story appears in VICE Magazine’s Burnout and Escapism Issue. Click HERE to subscribe.

Continue reading “Meet the People Trying to Live Long Enough to Live Forever” »