Thirteen unresponsive ICU patients changed a tone using thought alone
In a Columbia study of 41 brain-injured patients who could not move or speak, a third shifted a beep’s pitch through bedside EEG, and those who did recovered far more often.
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A cochlear implant with no outside parts goes on sale in Europe
MED-EL’s TICI UNICO puts the microphone and a 40-hour battery under the skin; 40 people had one by launch day, and the 30-patient trial…
Humans follow the pitch of a melody, zebra finches follow its color
Trained on the same five-tone sequences, people relied on pitch while finches combined pitch with formants, and musical training changed how the humans listened.
Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective bring Correspondences to Milan
A decade of field recordings answered by Smith’s poetry fills Triennale Milano from November 26, with two live performances at the Teatro Lirico that…
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FeaturesThe long reads
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Hearing-aid users died less often in a 64,000-person, four-country study
Across Australia, Iceland, the US and Norway, people with hearing loss who wore hearing aids had a 9 to 15% lower risk of death,…
Pink noise cost sleepers 19 minutes of REM in a Penn lab
A week of sleep-lab nights with 25 adults found that the steady hiss sold as a sleep aid trimmed dream sleep, and that foam…
The 40 Hz Alzheimer’s bet gets its verdict before year end
Cognito Therapeutics’ 670-patient HOPE trial of a flickering, humming headset reads out by December, and every efficacy number so far comes from 76 people.
Science
More →In Alzheimer’s, the songs that stay familiar come from earlier childhood
A Helsinki study of 101 older adults found pleasure in old songs held steady as dementia advanced, while the songs that felt…
Singing did no better than conversation in a small dementia trial
Fifteen Amsterdam nursing-home residents tried both a singing group and a talking group; each helped in a different way, and neither came…
Phantom music is not mainly a hearing-loss problem, a Dutch study finds
Among 80 people in The Hague who hear music no one is playing, half had no documented hearing loss, and most heard…
Practice
More →How to try a sound bath without buying the hype
Singing bowls and gongs have moved into offices and cathedrals; the studies behind them are small and single-session, and worth knowing before…
The 10-minute birdsong reset, and why traffic cancels it
Two 2026 studies found 10 minutes of birdsong raised heart-rate variability and improved mood, and that road noise below WHO limits erased…
Bring your own playlist to the needle and the scanner
In a 204-patient Zürich trial, patients’ own favorite music cut cannulation pain where “relaxation music” did nothing, and a 57-study review explains…
Culture
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Bill Fontana made Grace Cathedral listen to San Francisco
For nearly 13 weeks this summer, sensors on the carillon and microphones inside silent organ pipes turned the building into an instrument played by…
A humpback’s song is shaped by the dive that carries it
Suction-cup tags on 16 singing males off Maui mapped whole songs onto whole dives for the first time, and some singers kept going for…
Two weeks left to hear Salisbury Cathedral’s Singing Gallery
“Joyful Noise” closes October 25; Emeka Ogboh’s choir sings from the medieval gallery above the west doors, and Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim makes…
BriefsThe news, read for you
The week in sound →A cochlear implant with no outside parts goes on sale in Europe
MED-EL’s TICI UNICO puts the microphone and a 40-hour battery under the skin; 40 people had one by launch day, and the 30-patient trial is unpublished.
Humans follow the pitch of a melody, zebra finches follow its color
Trained on the same five-tone sequences, people relied on pitch while finches combined pitch with formants, and musical training changed how the humans listened.
Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective bring Correspondences to Milan
A decade of field recordings answered by Smith’s poetry fills Triennale Milano from November 26, with two live performances at the Teatro Lirico that week.
Recorded reef sound drew far more fish larvae in a Hawaiian bay
An underwater speaker in Kāneʻohe Bay pulled 4 to 14 times more young fish to artificial reef blocks, and coral larvae settled most on the blocks…
A cochlear implant with upgradeable firmware makes TIME’s inventions list
Cochlear says its Nucleus Nexa is the only implant that can take new firmware after surgery, but the company has not said what upgrades it plans.
Music written to sound sweet changed how 28 brains processed taste
In a brain-scanner study in Scientific Reports, sweet drinks paired with matching music lit up taste and reward areas more than sweet drinks alone.
ExplainersThe physics and the physiology, plainly
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Binaural beats, the evidence on one page
A February 2026 review found 10 small trials in people aged 19 to 24, and a 308-person company…
How your ear turns air pressure into perception
From eardrum to a coiled piano keyboard inside the skull, with 15,000 hair cells that do not grow…
What music therapy, music medicine and sound healing each mean
Six things get sold under the word “sound”: a licensed clinical profession, a tablet of songs, a gong,…
What is a sound wave, and why 432 Hz is not magic
Pressure, frequency, amplitude and resonance in plain language, and why the 432 Hz and 528 Hz “healing tuning”…