A team of researchers from Switzerland’s Bern University of Arts have discovered that sound affects the development of cheese and hip-hop makes things cheesiest. For six months, the team exposed nine 22-pound wheels of Emmental cheese to an endless, 24-hour loop of music using a mini-transducer, which directed the sound waves directly into the cheese wheels. The “classical” cheese mellowed to the sounds of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The “rock” … [Read more...]

For neurologists, human hearing is a process full of unanswered questions. How does the brain translate sounds -- vibrations that travel through the air -- into the patterns of neural activity that we recognize as speech, or laughter, or the footsteps of an approaching friend? And are those same neural processes universal, or do they vary across cultures? With support from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Social, … [Read more...]

Sony Music Entertainment Japan has launched its Mora Qualitas hi-res streaming service, working with Rhapsody International (through its ‘Powered by Napster’ B2B business). Plans for the service were actually announced in December 2018, but it’s taken 10 months for the ‘formal’ launch of the service to happen. Mora Qualitas is offering FLAC-quality streaming, with Sony Music’s hi-res catalogue accompanied by tracks from Universal Music Japan, … [Read more...]