Music and science

A dancing sea lion and why I haven’t written a book about music and science

When I think about musical animals, I usually think about Snowball, the cockatoo who showed her dance moves online in 2008. Snowball’s moves were studied by researcher Ani Patel, to learn more about the basic neuroscience of rhythm. I met Patel in 2010 at the SciFoo meeting at Google, and I think I might have tried to set up an interview with him shortly after but I can’t actually find that on my laptop so I’m not sure. I know I would have tried, because back then, I was still planning to write a book about the overlap of music and science. I have since given up on that idea (more on that below the paywall if you’re curious) but I still love reading about all those interesting music and science topics. In fact, this newsletter started out more than a decade ago as a quarterly newsletter only about music and science. Shoutout to the hardcore followers who have been here since then! It’s now much more than that, and I’m branching out to other topics, but I do still keep up with music/science news.

Photo by Alphacolor on Unsplash

So obviously, when I found out about Ronan the rhythmical sea lion I had to write about her! I covered the news on Forbes, where you can read the full piece. They pitted Ronan against some undergraduate students, and she was noticeably better at keeping a beat, especially compared to some students. In the video below you can clearly see how only some of the students keep up with her.

This kind of research is also interesting because before Ronan only humans and birds could move to a beat. There was even a theory that this ability had to do with the ability to vocalise like a human. A cockatoo can mimic human speech - is that why they can dance? But Ronan put all that to rest because sea lions don’t do that at all. So there’s something else going on. It really shows how much there still is to learn about how our brains respond to music!

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Interesting Links

• The chemistry behind the Vatican’s white smoke that signalled the announcement of a new pope. Explained by Mark Lorch on The Conversation

• Two science students and origami enthusiasts at Tufts university are trying to make a better origami paper.

• Charles Brooks Photographs the Interiors of Musical and Scientific Instruments. By Jackie Andres for Colossal

• A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse. By Cade Metz and Karen Weise for the New York Times.

• 99 celebrities wished David Attenborough a happy 99th birthday in The Guardian, and shared was his science communication work has meant to them.

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Why no book about music and science?

For years, from about 2009 to at least 2017, I was seriously planning to write a book about the overlap between science and music. It would be centered around what I called “musisci” - people who are active in both fields - to show how far the overlap went. But as I learned more about book writing, I started to see why it wouldn’t work