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When Musicians Unintentionally Steal
Pacific Standard: Imagine your favorite musician, actor, filmmaker, or painter. Undoubtedly, each one grew up idolizing—emulating, even—their artistic heroes. As such, if you pay close enough attention, it’s not hard to see those influences permeating
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The Psychological Reason ‘Billie Jean’ Kills at Weddings
The Atlantic: “… Baby, One More Time” is not a good song. You could make a convincing argument, in fact, that it is an actively terrible song: devoid of musical merit, underdeveloped, overproduced, eroding our
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Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy
The New Yorker: My sister has a rare talent for mishearing lyrics. When we were younger, song meanings would often morph into something quite different from their original intent. In one Wallflowers hit, for instance
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A Musical Fix for American Schools
The Wall Street Journal: American education is in perpetual crisis. Our students are falling ever farther behind their peers in the rest of the world. Learning disabilities have reached epidemic proportions, affecting as many as
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: Practice Does Not Make Perfect: No Causal Effect of Music Practice on Music Ability Miriam A. Mosing, Guy Madison, Nancy L. Pedersen, Ralf Kuja-Halkola, and Fredrik Ullén How essential is practice to
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What Do Great Musicians Have in Common? DNA
Scientific American: At age 13, jazz great Thelonious Monk ran into trouble at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. The reason: he was too good. The famously precocious pianist was, as they say, a “natural,” and by that
