In the beginning, there was music. Childhood and young adulthood floated by to a soundtrack of lyrics and rhythms and searing guitar riffs that consumed you, became you, constituted your identity, galvanized your intent, spoke your soul.

But time passes, classrooms fade to cubicles, and a vast landscape of new music turns foreign and unexplored. For Jeff Hersh, 31, the stereo came to double as Proust's madeleine, its purpose to invoke memories rather than create them.

"Finding music was easier when I was younger," says Hersh, a vice president at Smith Barney in New York. "In college I lived in a fraternity house with 70 guys all around me at all times, listening to various kinds of music. But as you get older, you work more, you get isolated."

Then in November, a friend told Hersh about Pandora.com, an inventive "Internet radio" website that generates music streams — "stations" — based on one's favorite artists or songs. He started his own private thread of music that was a combination of Neil Young and Pearl Jam, Hersh says, and in an hour he heard more new music he liked than he had in the last decade, much of it from obscure bands that shared musical traits with Young and Pearl Jam.

Seven years ago Reginald King was lying in a hospital bed recovering from bypass surgery when he first heard the music.

It began with a pop tune, and others followed. Mr. King heard everything from cabaret songs to Christmas carols. "I asked the nurses if they could hear the music, and they said no," said Mr. King, a retired sales manager in Cardiff, Wales.

"I got so frustrated," he said. "They didn't know what I was talking about and said it must be something wrong with my head. And it's been like that ever since."

Each day, the music returns. "They're all songs I've heard during my lifetime," said Mr. King, 83. "One would come on, and then it would run into another one, and that's how it goes on in my head. It's driving me bonkers, to be quite honest."

Last year, Mr. King was referred to Dr. Victor Aziz, a psychiatrist at St. Cadoc's Hospital in Wales. Dr. Aziz explained to him that there was a name for his experience: musical hallucinations.

Dr. Aziz belongs to a small circle of psychiatrists and neurologists who are investigating this condition. They suspect that the hallucinations experienced by Mr. King and others are a result of malfunctioning brain networks that normally allow us to perceive music.

Imagine a locked room in which a person sits alone staring into space. There is nothing to look at. Nothing to touch or taste or smell. Most of the world is stripped away. Except for sounds.

But these sounds resemble nothing heard before. They lack all similarity to experience and any reference to surroundings. Now imagine that those sounds — heard for the first time — are the sounds of a Beethoven Symphony. Or an Indian raga. What would that disembodied ear and mind make of them? How much would be understood?

In recent decades such a situation would have been considered artificial, abstract and irrelevant. What kind of musical understanding can grow out of this kind of isolation, lacking the resonance of a cultural framework, lacking the expectations provided by the knowledge of a style and lacking some sense of historical and political context? To understand music, we have been taught, that room has to be unlocked, the windows opened and the world fully engaged.

It's no secret that exercise improves mood, but new research suggests that working out to music may give exercisers a cognitive boost.

Listening to music while exercising helped to increase scores on a verbal fluency test among cardiac rehabilitation patients.

"This is the first study to look at the combined effects of music and short-term exercise on mental performance," said Charles Emery, the study's lead author and a professor of psychology at Ohio State University.

"Evidence suggests that exercise improves the cognitive performance of people with coronary artery disease," Emery said. "And listening to music is thought to enhance brain power. We wanted to put the two results together."

This is a revised second edition of Dr. Steblin's important work on key characteristics, first published in 1983 by UMI Research Press and re-issued by the University of Rochester Press in 1996. The revision has been limited to a thorough correction and update of the material in the first edition, so as to not disrupt the content and organization, for which the book has been praised as a significant and noteworthy reference for both scholars and research students alike. The book discusses the extra-musical meanings associated with various musical keys by ancient Greek and medieval-renaissance theorists and inparticular composers and writers on music in the Baroque, Classical, and early Romantic periods. Chapters focus on Mattheson's extensive key descriptions from 1713, the Rameau-Rousseau and Marpurg-Kirnberger controversies regarding unequal versus equal temperaments, and C.F.D. Schubart's influential list based on the sharp-flat (bright-dark) principle of key-distinctions. Rita Katherine Steblin is a world-renowned music scholar, living and working in Vienna.

The quest to produce the ultimate realistic virtual grand piano took a big leap today with "Ivory," announced by Synthogy and distributor ILIO at Winter NAMM 2004 in Anaheim.

The secret: Synthogy's proprietary 32-bit sample-playback and digital signal processing (DSP) engine, which was specifically built from the ground up to bring out the resonance, response and character of three of the world's finest concert grands: the German Steinway D 9' Concert Grand, Bösendorfer 290 Imperial Grand, and Yamaha C7 Grand, with 20 Gigabytes (3,500 samples) digitally recorded in the finest studios and concert halls. All 88 keys of each piano were individually sampled in up to 8 dynamic levels, including the extended low octave on the Bösendorfer.

"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."
- J. S. Bach

So we reach for art and music, though we know it will be flawed,
Yet in striving to do better, we are reaching out to God.
We are reaching for perfection, and it's not beyond our scope;
Every act of creation is an act of hope.
- Catherine Faber, Acts of Creation

Here we describe loss of the feeling or emotion produced by music itself. Musical emotion can be considered at a number of levels. At the most fundamental level, dissonance produces a perception that is unpleasant to most listeners.1 More variable is the intense pleasure that certain music may evoke in particular listeners, often described as a "shiver down the spine" or "chills",2 which is likely to represent a more complex aesthetic response. We describe a patient with selective loss of this emotional response to music, due to a focal brain lesion.

A 52 year old right handed radio announcer collapsed in February 2000. He was found afterwards to have a total loss of speech comprehension and output, and a right hemiplegia. His speech recovered well, such that 12 months after the event he had only subtle output phonological problems. Motor functions recovered completely and he had no residual lateralising motor signs. However, he reported a persistent alteration in his auditory experience. He was in the habit of listening to classical music, to relax after working his night shift at the radio station, and had derived particular pleasure from listening to Rachmaninov preludes. He experienced an intense, altered emotional state or "transformation" when he did this. In common with other subjects who have this experience, the transformation was only produced by particular pieces, and he did not describe such an experience in response to music other than Rachmaninov’s, nor to other sensory experiences. This emotional response to the music was lost following the acute event, and remained absent during the period of testing between 12 and 18 months after the stroke. During this period he was able to enjoy other aspects of life, and reported no biological features of depression. He had noticed no change in his hearing, and was still able to identify speech, music, and environmental sounds normally.

New research suggests that we like music that sounds just like us.

Music is one of the human species's relatively few universal abilities. Without formal training, any individual, from Stone Age tribesman to suburban teenager, has the ability to recognize music and, in some fashion, to make it.

Why this should be so is a mystery. After all, music isn't necessary for getting through the day, and if it aids in reproduction, it does so only in highly indirect ways. Language, by contrast, is also everywhere -- but for reasons that are more obvious. With language, you and the members of your tribe can organize a migration across Africa, build reed boats and cross the seas, and communicate at night even when you can't see each other. Modern culture, in all its technological extravagance, springs directly from the human talent for manipulating symbols and syntax.

Imagine having a singer with a world-class voice at your disposal, any hour of any day. She's just standing at the ready, game to perform whatever silly song you might make up for her: a ballad about her love for you, a tribute to your best friend's golf game, a stirring rendition of the evening's dinner menu.

Close friends of Madonna or Mariah may already have had that pleasure, but for everyone else a new technology called Vocaloid may offer the next best thing. Developed at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and financed by the Yamaha Corporation, the software, which is due to be released to consumers in January, allows users to cast their own (or anyone else's) songs in a disembodied but exceedingly life-like concert-quality voice.

Scientists are trying to understand why music - a pleasurable but seemingly unnecessary part of life - is universal in all human societies, ancient and modern.

Archaeologists have found evidence of musical activity dating back at least 50,000 years. Even babies as well as some animals, such as birds, whales and monkeys, have a built-in sense of tone and rhythm, according to a set of six papers on the origin and function of music in the July edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience.

In lovers' songs, military marches, weddings and funerals — every occasion where a degree of emotion needs to be evoked — music is an indispensable ingredient.

Yet the ability to enjoy music has long puzzled biologists because it does nothing evident to help survival. Why, therefore, should evolution have built into the human brain this soul-stirring source of pleasure? Man's faculties for enjoying and producing music, Darwin wrote, "must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."

One of the most puzzling aspects of the brain's faculty for music is perfect or absolute pitch, the ability to identify a note without any reference point. Only a few musicians have the skill. Most rely on relative pitch.

Ordinary listeners can identify six to eight categories of pitch within an octave, but people with absolute pitch can assign notes to much finer subdivisions, approaching 70 or more, Dr. Robert J. Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute wrote in a recent issue of Nature Neuroscience.