The Amazing Music World

​Musicians Have Shorter Life Spans Than the General Population

Is this statement True or False?​

​Answer: TRUE

​One study, conducted by a University of Sydney examined the deaths of artists which took place between 1950 and June 2014. The study specifically looked at longevity and the proportion of suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths. The results? Musicians' lifespans are 25 years shorter.

​Who was he?

• Mozart​

• Beethoven

• Chopin

​Mozart

In fact, Mozart sold the most CDs in 2016, beating out Adele, Drake, and Beyoncé, even though all of those artists had Grammy-winning hits that year.​

​"Wanna Be" by The Spice Girls is the Catchiest Song

of All Time

​n 2014, a group of researchers from The Museum of Science and Industry in England released an online test called "Hooked on Music." It contained one thousand quips from pop hits, going all the way back to the 1940s, and it asked 12,000 participants to identify songs as fast as possible. They found that "Wannabe" by The Spice Girls was the catchiest song: people were able to recognize it in about 2.3 seconds, which was way below the 5-second average of identifying other popular songs.

​An Astronaut Released an Album with All Songs Recorded in Space

​In 2015, a Canadian astronaut named Chris Hadfield released his first album, which was entirely recorded while he was in orbit. Not only was he the first Canadian to walk in space, he's also a talented musician whose went viral with a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity." Hadfield spent 144 days at the International Space Station recording his 11 original songs for his appropriately-titled album, Space Sessions: Songs for a Tin Can.

​"Jingle Bells" Was Originally a Thanksgiving Song

"Jingle Bells" is a Christmas classic, but it didn't originate that way. Written by James Lord Pierpont and published in 1857, it was meant to be sung during Thanksgiving.

​None of The Beatles Could Read or Write Music

​There had been some speculation for decades, but Paul McCartney finally admitted during a 2018 60 Minutes interview that neither he nor any of his Beatles bandmates were able to read or write music, and they never understood music theory.

​Metallica is the First and Only Band to Have Played on All 7 Continents

Subject | Subject

​Listening to Music Utilizes the Entire Brain

​In 2011, Finnish researchers had developed a groundbreaking new method to study how the brain processes different aspects of music, including rhythm, tonality, and timbre (sound color) in a realistic listening situation. The study was pioneering in that revealed for the first time how wide networks in the brain, including areas responsible for motor actions, emotions, and creativity, are all activated while listening to music. This new method helped better understand the complex dynamics of the brain and the many ways in which music affects us.