news 2013

Researchers have found that listeners engage with classical music more when musicians improvise. A collaboration of researchers from Imperial College London and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama examined the electrical signals in the brains of musicians and listeners. Although improvisation is not commonly associated with classical music, the new study suggests that introducing elements of improvisation into classical concerts could increase audience engagement.

The sound vibrations that make up music can make solar panels work harder, according to new research, and pop music performs better than classical. Scientists showed that high pitched sounds like those common in pop and rock music caused the greatest improvement in the solar cells' power output, increasing it by up to forty per cent.

An international team, including Oxford University scientists, has used the powerful X-ray laser at the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to create atomic-scale movies of 'the ultimate spring'. Normally, when a metal is crushed suddenly, as during an impact, it deforms and buckles, with the atoms re-arranging themselves in a complex way to take up the deformed shape - and usually only small pressures allow a metal to 'bounce back' like a spring.

Researchers have devised a mathematical model which can be used to predict whether films will become blockbusters or flops at the box office - up to a month before the movie is released. Their model is based on an analysis of the activity on Wikipedia pages about American films released in 2009 and 2010.

A new research project led by the School of Social Sciences will use creative arts practices to help inform health-related policy and service development. Funded jointly by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the 'Representing Communities' project, will use innovative research techniques to promote engagement between communities and policy makers.

New research and detailed records of over 1,000 paintings have gone online as part of an ongoing project to research over 22,000 artworks held in public collections around the UK. The National Inventory of Continental European Paintings (NICE Paintings) project is cataloguing and digitising all of the pre-1900 Continental European oil paintings in the UK's public collections and making them available to the public, alongside new supporting information.