What is a harpsichord?

Arnold Schoenberg designed a musical typewriter that transcribed complex compositions with a simple keyboard.

An electric pipe organ in Germany is playing a song for 639 years

Created by composer John Cage, the Halberstadt organ first began playing the piece in September 2001, and has since made only nine chord changes. The device within a medieval church utilizes compressed air to play continuous tones. The next chord change is scheduled for August 2026.

Hear what ancient Greek music sounded like.

Operas first began at the end of the Italian Renaissance

Opera is a storytelling art form that has seen various eras including the Renaissance, Baroque period, Classical period, Romantic period, 20th Century, and Modern period. Each era has its own distinct style, reflecting the tastes of its people and prominent composers.

Bardcore: the modern exploration of medieval music

The medieval instrumentation and lyric interpretation of modern pop, rock, metal, and hip-hop took off in April 2020, launching a new and growing genre. Bardcore is defined by its use of musical nostalgia and internet culture's "memeification," according to the historians in this nearly two-hour-long podcast. Listen to this episode to hear a medievalist and music historian break down the rise, relevance, and reasons behind Bardcore.

Arnold Schoenberg expanded the confines of music by abandoning traditional chords and embracing dissonance.

Mozart defined the Classical period with realism and social commentary

Dive into the Classical period, a time that emphasized a less extravagant approach to music and focused on societal issues. Defined by Mozart’s influence, find specifics about his career and why he’s remembered for his compositions and the wit and emotional depth of operas like "The Magic Flute."

The origin of the 'barbershop quartet'

Barbershop is subgenre of acapella, limited to four singers who all play highly specific roles. If you see a particularly inspired quartet, you might even see them in old-timey barber dress, a nod to style's origin: the British barbershop. This brief explainer from Mental Floss breaks down the strange story behind the form and how it traveled overseas to become the music we know today.

Christmas carols evolved from medieval folk songs to modern holiday staples

Christmas carols began as communal folk songs in medieval Europe, and were later adapted into religious hymns. Revived in England in the 19th century, they have become a core holiday tradition around the world.

The history of music explained in 8 minutes

Traditional music history focuses on composers and sees music as an object. Historian Michael Spitzer focuses on music's role in everyday activity and sees it not as an object, but an activity. This brief history illuminates the fundamental role music plays in human culture, and sounds a hopeful not for music in the internet age.

Opera seria and opera buffa differ in their tones and themes

Opera began in the late 1590s with "Dafne" and evolved into two styles by the 18th century. Opera seria catered to elites with heroic, mythological themes, while opera buffa brought humor and relatable stories to wider audiences. Today, modern opera often tackles contemporary social issues.

Opera melodies from centuries ago still appear in TV and movies today

Even if you haven't witnessed an 18th century opera, you've likely heard melodies from one in modern media like “Apocalypse Now” and “Sesame Street.” Today, sports events, movies, and television feature operatic melodies even over a century after they were written.

3D printing has made musical instruments more accessible

Violins fabricated from durable plastic, rather than being built from wood, can cost hundreds of dollars less, allowing children to try them out without financial pressure. They can be made in colors that appeal to children, sizes tailored to their bodies, and with tactile guides to help visually impaired learners.

The Antikythera mechanism: The oldest-known analog computer

A device now considered the world's oldest computer was pulled from a shipwreck more than 120 years ago. Known as the "Antikythera Mechanism," it is now believed to have allowed precise tracking of astronomical positions, and its sophistication overturned understanding of Ancient Greek capabilities.

The first surviving opera tells the story of Orpheus and Euridice

Jacopo Peri's “Euridice,” premiered in 1600, is the oldest surviving opera. The story is based on the Greek mythology tale about a musician named Orpheus who attempts to save his wife from the underworld by pleasing the god Hades with his musical talents.

Operas rely more on music for storytelling than musicals

It’s easy to confuse operas and musicals since they both tell stories through singing and music—but a few key differences remain. While musicals rely on words as the primary tool for storytelling, opera relies more on music. Other key distinctions lie in vocal techniques.

Operas can be serious, comedic, or both

Opera is a complex art form that includes a range of genres. The most commonly presented types are opera seria, opera buffa, opera semiseria, opéra comique, and grand opéra. Each genre varies in its philosophy and approach, with differences in subject matter, tone, and display.

Arnold Schoenberg's experimentations with dissonance and sound influenced the way films are scored.

The first known mention of the term 'country' to describe music was in 1736

The November 26, 1736 issue of the Virginia Gazette described a fiddling contest for "country" musicians. While the musical style would go by many names over the next two centuries, "country" was the one that eventually stuck.

More than 2,000 years ago, a hand-powered model of the solar system called the Antikythera mechanism—the oldest example of an analog computer—could predict solar eclipses.

A timeline of computer history

The earliest computers bear little resemblance to the computing devices that most people rely on today. This timeline graphic from the Computer History Museum tracks their evolution, from the early days of bulky mainframes that only experts generally used through to the personal computing revolution and on to the modern mobile era. Readers will learn important context ahead of the next major computing platform shift.

Meta's Quest and other mixed reality devices can make learning new skills easier

PianoVision utilizes the passthrough visibility of a headset to illuminate which keys to play on a real piano or keyboard, providing an immersive, software-based learning alternative to human instruction. Similar apps also offer virtual model replacements for physical devices, such as a virtual piano, to practice with.

Jazz musicians use different melodic approaches to produce improvised performances

While jazz musicians are known for their improvisational skills, they rely on years of training and a complex understanding of compositions to inform their improvised solos, using a song's structure and chords to make their in-the-moment choices. Although jazz artists could, in theory, play whatever they wanted, musicians often employ common melodic approaches—such as scalar improvisation and arpeggios—to generate solos.

Type out a tone and play it back with this fun game

Compose an original piece of music from your phone or desktop with this simple, super fun interface: Just start typing, discover the various sounds associated with each key or letter, and then press play. Go back, tweak, delete, and revise to your...

Playing music enhances the creation, storage, and retrieval of memories

Scans of the brains of individuals who play instruments have shown enhanced connectivity between multiple brain regions—visual, auditory, and motor cortices—and the corpus callosum, which connects the two brain hemispheres. These complex connections are strengthened through practice and then used in other activities that involve both logic and creativity. The brains of musicians also appear to give experiences multiple types of memory tags, such as audio, emotional, and conceptual, improving their processing.

The Middle Ages produced inventions that still affect our lives today, like coffee houses and improved agricultural techniques.

Sondheim was the king of the patter song

Patter songs are up-tempo numbers that match beats and syllables, requiring singers to flex serious verbal dexterity. Stephen Sondheim's patter songs are some of the most famous in Broadway history, featuring rapid-fire speech and clever turns of phrase. This video breaks down some of the finest examples.

Europe’s first universities emerged from medieval church school

The modern university can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when schools in Italy, France, and England initially trained clergy before expanding to include lay students. By the 10th and 11th centuries, they taught law, medicine, and theology across Europe.

Operatic singing involves a number of different vocal personalities

Opera singing ranges are typically categorized by gender and then further subdivided into specific voice types like bass, baritone, tenor, mezzo-soprano, countertenor, and soprano voices. From the lowest to highest range, experience the difficult and impressive singing styles.

Broadway's songwriters began experimenting in the 1920s

Broadway’s early decades were heavily influenced by opera and vaudeville, but songwriters in the 1920s began exploring more narrative-based songwriting and psychologically complex characters. That trend would continue in the following decades, though it would evolve in even more nuanced ways.

The history of the tennis racket

Today's tennis rackets are made from lightweight composite materials, which is a big reason power, speed, and spin dominate today's game. But they weren't always built this way. This Top Sport Gear video shows the evolution of the tennis racket, from its start as medieval paddles, to the wood rackets of the early 1900s.

Explore a visual and auditory guide to wave properties and waveforms to learn how every sound imaginable can be created by combining multiple vibrations of air.

Medieval hospitals existed centuries before modern medicine

Long before modern healthcare, medieval Europe established hospitals that served multiple roles, including religious, social, and medical purposes. This podcast explores how institutions like Siena's Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala supported urban and rural communities for centuries.

The physics behind opera singing

How can opera singers project their voices to audiences in huge auditoriums without using microphones and overpowering the orchestra? This video explains this phenomenon, using animation to demonstrate the physics of the human voice and how opera singers hone their technique to hit higher frequencies and a distinctive ringing timbre known as their squillo.

Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music influenced generations of musicians who followed.

Handel's 1741 'Messiah' saved him from financial ruin

The piece is widely recognized as a masterpiece and a perennial expression of highbrow culture during the holiday season. The biblically based, English text also broke from opera norms at the time, rewarding him for his risky innovations.

Designed in 1937 by Harvard graduate student Howard H. Aiken, the 'Harvard Calculator' was used by the US Navy to solve advanced physics problems.

Opera terminology heavily relies on Italian

Most commonly used Opera terms are not in English. This glossary provides definitions of keywords like “libretto,” the text of a piece, “tenor,” the highest natural adult male singing voice, and “diva,” a female opera star.

20th-century country music was influenced by Hawaiian instruments

When people talk about influences on country music, they mention the European and African folk traditions that blended together to form the earliest country standards. Hawaiian music has had an incredible influence on country music, too, though, especially in terms of the genre's sound: the steel guitar and lap steel.

The Middle Ages, the roughly 1,000-year period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, shaped the political and cultural foundations of modern Europe.

What Stonehenge sounded like

Researchers built the first scale model of the world's best-known prehistoric stone circle, Stonehenge, to study its acoustic properties. Built approximately 5,000 years ago, the landmark in southern England has puzzled historians for centuries, but...

The belief that classical music enhances intelligence is mostly incorrect

"The Mozart Effect" was based on a 1993 study by psychologist Francis Rauscher. Rauscher played a Mozart Piano Sonata for college students and then assessed their spatial reasoning, finding it improved for 10 to 15 minutes. The media ran with a simpler story: listening to classical music made you smarter.

Chess traces its roots to chaturanga in sixth-century India

The earliest form of chess, known as chaturanga, emerged in India around the sixth century. The game simulated four divisions of the military—infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots—and laid the foundation for modern chess’ structure and strategy.

Breaking down the music theory of Hitchcock's 'Psycho'

One of the defining features of Hitchcock’s film “Psycho” (1960) is the music, especially the sounds you hear during some particularly grisly scenes. This analysis from The Music Professor analyzes how that music complements the film, highlighting the way strings match the intensity of the film’s screenplay and black-and-white cinematography.

How Apple's GarageBand changed music

Apple's preinstalled, easy-to-use software GarageBand was first released in 2004. Since then, it's changed the way artists write and record music. The program's accessibility and ease of use have allowed beginner artists to experiment and find their voice, while major artists like Rihanna, Grimes, and Bjork have used the program to record hit singles and perform live. This article from the Red Bull Music Academy explains how the basic interface reshaped an industry.

A lot of jazz relies on syncopation

The style is when a musician plays a rhythm on the opposite side of the beat. That means notes are played on the "upbeats," or the spaces between the main beats of a musical bar. The effect is music that can sound unpredictable, even if it's been carefully constructed.

Famicom was the predecessor to the NES

Before the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in the US, Nintendo released a similar console in Japan with some interesting differences, including a Delorean-like exterior and a built-in microphone for karaoke.

Microphone technology made crooning possible

Before the electric microphone, vocalists needed to project to have their voices captured. The new technology, however, made softer, more intimate singing possible, leading to a new style of singing that took off in the late 1920s, with "crooners" becoming some of the first American pop stars.

Many satires use parody, though not all parodies are satires

A parody is an impression of another artist's or work's style that intentionally exaggerates its aesthetics. Many satires employ parody to convey their message, although some parodies are simply humorous embodiments of a style without offering any deeper, satirical point. That's often the case with music parodies.

One of the first mechanical calculators—the Pascaline—was built in the 1640s by French mathematician Blaise Pascal to help his father, who worked as a tax collector.