The tone and tuning of musical instruments has the power to manipulate our appreciation of harmony, new research shows. The findings challenge centuries of Western music theory and encourage greater experimentation with instruments from different cultures.
A research collaboration between the University of Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London and the Institute for High Pressure Physics in Troitsk has discovered the fastest possible speed of sound.
Mice court one another with ultrasonic love songs that are inaudible to the human ear. New research shows they make these unique high frequency sounds using a mechanism that has only previously been observed in supersonic jet engines.
Future hearing aids could be adjusted by the wearer to remove background noise using new technology that could also be used to clean up and search YouTube videos.
An epic, 24-hour celebration of religious music will be taking place at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, this week, starting on Wednesday evening (June 22).
Almost 2,000 years after its last native speakers disappeared, the sound of Ancient Babylonian is being lined up for an unlikely comeback, in an online audio archive.
Greece was the birthplace of democracy, but our own political system would be unrecognisable to voters in Ancient Athens. As Classicist Paul Cartledge explains, however, that doesn’t mean that our ancient forbears have left us with nothing to learn.
Renaissance scholar Dr Abigail Brundin, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Italian, has been awarded an ‘I Tatti’ Fellowship from Harvard University, enabling her to spend time exploring 16th- and 17th-century Florentine archives. She hopes to shed light on a turbulent period in Italy’s literary history, when poets and writers laboured in the face of religious censorship.
Nine of the 44 new Royal Society Fellows announced today are Cambridge academics. Their election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society recognises their exceptional contributions to society. As Fellows of the UK's national academy of science, these leaders in the fields of science, engineering and medicine join other famous Cambridge names such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking.
How easy is it to kick our fossil fuel habit? Could Britain live on its own renewables? Professor David Mackay, from the Department of Physics, will offer a straight talking assessment of the numbers behind the UK's need to reduce its energy consumption and move to sustainable energy solutions, in a lecture tonight.
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