Have you heard of ‘Mental Floss’? We love their videos! Thus, we wanted to share John Green’s ’25 Facts About the Science of Music’, an excellent video where some little-known facts on music are exposed.
September 4th, 2018
Here are our ‘Top 5’ Music Facts:
1. “Wannabe” by the Spice Girls is the catchiest song of all time?
In 2014, a group of researchers released an online game called Hooked on Music. It had a thousand quips from pop hits, going all the way back to the 1940s, and it asked players to identify songs as fast as possible. They found that Wannabe by the Spice Girls was the catchiest song because people were able to recognize it in about 2.3 seconds, way below the average of 5 seconds.
2. A fetus can enjoy songs while in the womb.
In the 1990s, a scientist named Sheila Woodward of the University of Capetown set out to determine whether a fetus can hear music, so she placed a two-inch, underwater microphone into the wombs of women in labor. With this experiment, Woodward discovered that music is detectable in the womb.
3. Music is important to infants
In 2013, researchers studied the effects of music on 272 premature infants in a neonatal intensive care unit, and they found that playing lullabies to the babies resulted in multiple positive behaviors, including lower heart rates and higher caloric intake.
4. Classical music fans and heavy metal fans are very similar (at least psychologically)
A 2008 study from Heriot-Watt University that had the surprising conclusion that classical music fans and heavy metal fans are very similar, at least psychologically. The researchers surveyed 36,000 music fans from six different countries and found that listeners of these two genres tended to be creative, gentle, and self-assured, except when in the mosh pit.
5. Classical music makes you smarter!
A French study published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences found that students did better on a quiz after a one-hour lecture with classical music in the background than students who learned the same material without the classical music playing.
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This article is a re-post, with small modifications, of “25 Facts About the Science of Music” an article published on mentalfloss.com
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