Sight over sound in the judgment of music performance →

This is a pretty interesting study that demonstrates just how dominant our vision is on judging stuff, even when it shouldn’t.

In this experiment, people were asked to pick a winner of a classical music competition from a 6 second clip of the performance. Some people got the audio only, others got the vision only (so no audio) and others got both audio and video.

Only those participants who watch the video without sound were able to judge the winners correctly with any statistical significance.

In other words, the judges were biased by how the musicians performed visually (or perhaps how they looked generally) when deciding who was the superior musician. Which of course should have had very little influence at all.  

$2 Billion and Counting →

This is a surprising account of how much Spotify is paying artists and details nicely the real state of the music industry and how Spotify is a bright spot in an otherwise miserable financial quagmire that is the music industry.