The bonang’s most beautiful harmonies | Science NewsIn one experiment, 170 U.S. participants listened to synthetic musical notes with timbres modeled after the bonang — a collection of small gongs played in a Javanese gamelan. The video tracks people’s pleasantness ratings for chords with these artificial bonang notes. The intervals that people identified as most pleasant did not align at all with Western mathematical rules for nice harmony — but did they did map pretty well onto...
Exactly when are chords pleasant? | Science NewsHere, 196 U.S. participants judged the pleasantness of octaves played with synthetic musical notes. The video tracks how people’s ratings for chord pleasantness as the interval between the notes changes. As the interval approaches 12 — a supposedly perfect octave marked with a blue vertical line— pleasantness ratings spike. But they peak just before and after this “ideal” octave interval, when sound pulsates slightly. Read more: h...
Japanese tit gesture to mates by fluttering their wings | Science NewsResearchers have observed Japanese tits (Parus minor) fluttering their wings to noiselessly tell mates to enter the nest first. It is the first known case of symbolic gesture in a nonprimate animal. Read more: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/fluttering-wings-bird-body-language Video: Toshitaka Suzuki
These birds gesture “after you” | Science NewsA female Japanese tit perches on a branch and flutters her wings. Soon after, her mate enters their nest followed by the female. Similar observations of eight mating pairs suggest that fluttering happens only when birds are in the company of their mates. Because the fluttering is directed at the mate rather than the nest, scientists suspect that these birds are using gestures to communicate a complex message. This is a first in birds. Rea...
See how AI nudges a human’s decisions in a cooking game | Science NewsA human (left) and AI (right) collaborate to cook soup containing tomatoes (red and green objects) and/or onions (beige objects). In this case, the AI, but not the human, knows that the duo will receive a bonus if the human serves the soup. The second half of the video shows the result of a new training method in which an AI learns how to influence human behavior. Here, the AI has figured out that if it places a dish...