song

Why does the voice of Elvis Presley singing "Love me tender" excite us? A study carried out by American scientists with healthy people and patients suffering from Williams syndrome - a rare genetic disorder caused by the loss of DNA on chromosome 7 - reveals that listening to music causes us to release oxytocin and arginine vasopressin, two hormones associated with the emotions.

Regardless of whether it is an African tribal dance or a solo sense of jazz played by a saxophonist, the language of music conveys a number of basic common emotions that anyone recognizes, even if it is the first time they hear a certain type of music. music, a study led by Thomas Fritz of the Max Planck Institute (Germany) recently demonstrated.

Whether you like classical music or rock or folk is your thing, listening to your favorite songs before and while playing a competitive sport improves your performance, according to a study presented this week at the Annual Conference of the British Society. of Psychology by Alexandra Lamont and her colleagues at Keele University.

Opera and classical music reduce rejection in heart transplants performed in mice, according to the results of a study published in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery.

From a physical point of view, listening to music through an iPod or mobile phone can bring us closer to others, since it reduces the size of our personal space, according to a recent study by the University of London. To test this, the researchers asked the participants to walk towards an unknown experimenter (male or female) to the point where they felt uncomfortable about the closeness.

Japanese chemist Shigeyoshi Osaki of Nara Medical University (Japan) has used silk from the spider Nephila maculata to make violin strings. The Japanese researcher, who is an expert in polymer chemistry and has been working with spider silk for 35 years, had previously suggested that the material could be used for surgical sutures and in bulletproof vests, but his passion for music has led him to put first test how the material would work on a musical instrument.

Distraction relieves pain, according to a new study published in The Journal of Pain. Its authors, from the University of Utah, have shown that music moves the cognitive focus away from the painful stimulus. Working with 143 subjects, did they ask them to listen to music, identify certain tones, follow the melody?

The European Space Agency (ESA) has just released the songs that have accompanied astronauts since manned space flights began. The first song heard was a Hawaiian tune aboard the Gemini 7 spacecraft in December 1965. A few years later, the Apollo astronauts brought with them the first cassette tapes of songs like Dvorak's New World Symphony. , the songs of The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, of the group The Moody Blues.