Here is a list of links to concerts in the Fringe featuring solo guitar, guitar duo, guitar in mixed ensemble & guitar/vocals. These links will take you to their entries in the fringe programme – giving details of dates, times, prices. Many of these artists have their own websites where you can hear samples of […]

How good is your ear for accents? How different do you think one word could sound in a variety of accents? A new interactive site entitled Sound Comparisons by Edinburgh University in conjunction with the Arts & Humanities Research Council allows you to hear the same word uttered in dozens of accents. I tried out […]

A child starts planning the storyboard, while another begins cutting some archived film. Two other classmates seek out some images on the net. Each student in this group, like all those students who attend Islay High School, are using their own Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC), which they bring to and from school to provide a […]

Got a spare 15 minutes? Would you like to take part in a national, online survey about how people listen to music? The mission of Feeling Sound Musiclab is to test how we perceive music – and also to gauge the nation’s favourite chord – the result of which will be used to commission a […]

The piece featured in today’s lunchtime Guitar Group rehearsal featured a short, slow introduction followed by a longer and much more upbeat section. Pupils had been encouraged to relax in the holidays and to refrain from practice in the hope of returning refreshed. So I wasn’t too disappointed to hear that the intro was a […]

In a recent edition of The Material World on Radio 4 there was a fascinating discussion on how the brain processes sound. Presented by the mercurial Quentin ‘For me science isn’t a subject, it’s a perspective’ Cooper the guests - Jan Schnupp from the University of Oxford and Sophie Scott from the Institute of Cognitive […]

Why should religious music be of interest to our largely secular society? BBC 4’s Sacred Music, presented by Simon Russel Beale, visited Notre Dame de Paris to show how two innovations of the 12th Century Notre Dame School underpin what has since come to be known as western classical music.
Four members of early music specialist […]

I was reminded of this quote today:
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826); 3rd president of US.
The reason it came to mind was that while thinking about apparent serendipity, an alternative perception occurred to me which might best […]

In the Music Matters special on Music & Health one of the guests, Dr John Zeisel, claimed that music attacks The Four A words associated with Alzheimers - agitation, aggression, anxiety & apathy. Aware that the study of dysfunction often enhances awareness of function, I soon began to wonder whether music (specifically the study of […]

One of the more interesting features to emerge from the New Scientist (NS) special The Roots of Music was an article on amusia. Like many people, I had imagined this simply to mean the inability to carry a tune or to perceive changes in pitch and rhythm. However, researching further in a listen again edition […]