Music displays all the harmony and discord the auditory world has to offer. The perfect pair of notes at the end of the Kyrie in Mozart’s Requiem fills churches and concert halls with a single chord ...

According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, ‘consonance’ – a pleasant-sounding combination of notes – is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More ...

A new theory suggests a natural basis for our preference for musical consonance. But does such a preference exist at all, wonders Philip Ball. What was avant-garde yesterday is often blandly ...

Are you performing in your right mind (Wilson, 1993)? The two hemispheres of our brain have very disparate functions. The left hemisphere of our brain is very cognitive. It controls our speech, ...

The notes used in Western music—or, more accurately, the relationships between the notes used in Western music—have a strange power. Bobby McFerrin demonstrated this dramatically by showing that an ...