Professor Bellis and his team analysed the careers of 1,064 artists who had made it into a catalogue of the 1,000 best albums of all time, as voted for by a poll of more than 200,000 people in 2000. Of these, 100 had died by 2005 - 9.6% of the men and 7.3% of the women. Accidents (16), drug/alcohol overdose (19) and the less rock'n'roll cancer (20) were the top three causes of death, with suicide (3), drug/alcohol related accidents (4) and violence (6) lower down the list. The mysterious "other" category (10) presumably included only truly original exits such as those of the ill-fated Spinal Tap drummers in the spoof rockumentary who variously vacated their stool after a bizarre gardening accident, on-stage spontaneous combustion and choking on someone else's vomit.

The sample of rock and pop stars was compared with mortality rates in a sample of the general population in Europe and North America. The results suggest that the most dangerous time for a star is during their first flush of fame. Stars are over three times more likely to die than ordinary people in the first five years after chart success, and in the first 10 years they are still at more than two and a half times the risk. And right up to 25 years after launching a career in showbiz, rock and pop stars are still more likely to meet their maker than the rest of us. At this point US and European rockers diverge. On this side of the Atlantic, mortality rates for rock survivors return nearly to normal, while in the US they continue to die off faster than the rest of the population.

Professor Mark Bellis, who headed up the study, is hoping that these findings will make people sit up and realize that the rock-star mortality rate is a "public health issue," a claim that was punctured by some former NME hack who claimed that the higher mortality rate was a good thing, given that "We have far too many middle-aged rock stars hanging around, clogging things up." Classy! (If not kinda true—imagine how creative the music industry would have to get if it couldn't rely on the dinosaur tours rolling around from town to town. But still, "clogging things up"?)

How rock stardom can take years off your life [Guardian]

"In a concert setting, for example, different individuals listen to a piece of music with wandering attention, but at the transition point between movements, their attention is arrested," said the paper's senior author Vinod Menon, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and of neurosciences.

"I'm not sure if the baroque composers would have thought of it in this way, but certainly from a modern neuroscience perspective, our study shows that this is a moment when individual brains respond in a tightly synchronized manner," Menon said.

The team used music to help study the brain's attempt to make sense of the continual flow of information the real world generates, a process called event segmentation. The brain partitions information into meaningful chunks by extracting information about beginnings, endings and the boundaries between events.

[. . .] No previous study, to the researchers' knowledge, has directly addressed the question of event segmentation in the act of hearing and, specifically, in music. [. . .]

In the analysis of the participants' brain scans, the researchers focused on a 10-second window before and after the transition between movements. They identified two distinct neural networks involved in processing the movement transition, located in two separate areas of the brain. They found what they called a "striking" difference between activity levels in the right and left sides of the brain during the entire transition, with the right side significantly more active.

Even better, you can see the activity for yourself, in the 20-second fMRI clip accompanying the piece. The study's implications for neuroscience and the humanities alike is pretty significant, but it also got me thinking something a lot more frivolous: what would those brainwaves look like set to other kinds of music? Imagine the YouTube possibilities.

Music moves brain to pay attention, Stanford study finds [Stanford School of Medicine]

The Interfax Russian news agency reports that most heavy metal songs are about murder and suicide, according to the Serbsky State Research Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry professor Fyodor Kondratyev.

"Having researched 700 most popular heavy metal songs revealed that half of them is about murder, 7 percent is positive about suicide, and 35 percent preaches a variety of Satanist ideologies," Kondratyev said in his interview published in Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily on Monday.

Two things came to mind here. One, this is obviously true; it corresponds with the prevailing stereotypes everyone has about metal and Satan and stuff, so of course it's based in fact. That's just, like, duh. The other is that MORE RESEARCH IS NEEDED! We must propagate more of this sort of useful information so that innocent, unwary music fans know what they're getting into. Here are the results of some scientific research, straight off the dome:

• Scotland Yard has determined that happy hardcore is 46% about rainbows
•An M.I.T. survey shows that 32% of glitchy laptop IDM features titles taken straight from the LiveJournal diaries of the music's makers, who are 94% dudes with few social skills
• Saint Louis University in Madrid, Spain, determined that a whopping 64% of flamenco is performed on the acoustic guitar
• According to an Oberlin College study, feminist folk accounts for the soundtrack of 58% of all L.U.G. (lesbian until graduation) indoctrination ceremonies, 97% of which occur in the dorm rooms of liberal-arts colleges
• A São Paulo institute has proven that 91% of Brazilian music is made in Brazil

Anyway, you get the idea. And so does Fyodor Kondratyev, to whom we dedicate these two clips:

35 Percent Of Heavy Metal Songs Have Satanic Content: Expert [Blabbermouth]