A World Without Barriers

"Hearing Hands", an ad campaign for Samsung of Turkey, brought the small suburban community of Bagcilar together for one man by the name of Muharram.  

With no more than a month of planning, Muharram became the center of an extraordinary stunt. Take a look below to see how Samsung heart-warmingly created a "World with no barriers".

Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory

"Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory," is a story of hope.  The captivating documentary follows social worker Dan Cohen, founder of the nonprofit organization Music & Memory, as he fights against a broken healthcare system to demonstrate music's ability to combat memory loss and restore a deep sense of self to those suffering from it.

Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett chronicles the astonishing experiences of individuals around the country who have been revitalized through the simple experience of listening to music. His camera reveals the uniquely human connection we find in music and how its healing power can triumph where prescription medication falls short.

When Sound and Touch Collide: A Little Synesthesia Exists in All of Us

Everyone knows the feeling -  the chills when you hear that one song, or the painful shivering at the sound of nails against a chalkboard.   Now, imagine if your body continuously heard sound through its skin.

Sherrilyn Roush is the first reported individual to have developed this form of synesthesia, a neurological mix-up of senses, after a stroke that left her numb in the left side of her body.  Researcher Tony Ro was lucky enough to study her incredible anomaly, and his theoretical findings are monumental.  He believes sense of hearing may have evolved from a sense of feeling, and that Roush’s merging of sound and touch is just an exaggerated version of what happens in all of our brains. Although speculative, it’s possible that what scientists now interpret as a merger of sound and touch might actually be a reflection of an earlier state in which the two senses were one.

Read the extraordinary story that led to this theory, here.

Why Some Cultures Don't 'Mind' Auditory Hallucinations

An auditory hallucination is a form of hallucination that involves perceiving sounds without auditory stimulus.  Although an alluding stigma of mental disorders may cause you to think that auditory hallucinations rarely stray from harsh and threatening, 'voice-hearing' can be quite the contrary. 

A new study suggests that schizophrenic people in more collectivist societies sometimes think their auditory hallucinations are helpful. Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. This may have clinical implications for how to treat people with schizophrenia, she suggests.

The Distorition of Sound

 

81 years young with 27 Grammys under his belt, Quincy Jones is the musical titan of the 20th century.  But what does he have to say about music of the 21st century?

Harman Kardon's new documentary, The Distortion of Sound, ventures into the complex pros and cons of music of the digital age.  Whilst the documentary contends a generation of music lovers being 'raised on low-grade sonic sludge', Jones' has a new dedication to soul and sound, which is making certain that music shall be heard and enjoyed in the way that its creators intend.

Take a look at the firm, here!

Making Instruments, Not Just Music: A Competition for Inventors

The Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, attracts instrument inventors from around the globe to compete for $10,000 worth of prizes in addition to recognition for their design, performance, and engineering ingenuity. 

The competition is designed to showcase how extraordinary ideas have the potential to change the way music is made and experienced.  Diverse participants shatter conventional boundaries and uniquely challenge the norms of musicality.  Take a look at some of the incredibly imaginative masterpieces, here!

 TECHNICAL AWARD: Du-Touche

By Bruno Verbrugghe & Jules Hotrique, France

FIRST PLACE: Perrotin ; Cantor Digitalis

By Christophe d'Alessandro, Boris Doval, 

Lionel Feugere, Olivier Perrotin, France

 SECOND PLACE: ndial

By Peter Bussigel, USA

 THIRD PLACE: PushPull

By Dominik Hildebrand Marques Lopes, 

Amelie Hinrichsen, & Till Bovermann, Germany

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 People's Choice Best Instrument, Best Performance:

Nomis, By Jonathan Sparks, USA

Harvard and M.I.T. Are Sued Over Lack of Closed Captions

Advocates for the deaf filed federal lawsuits against Harvard and M.I.T., saying both universities violated antidiscrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials.

The lawsuits, filed by the National Association of the Deaf, which is seeking class-action status, say the universities have “largely denied access to this content to the approximately 48 million — nearly one out of five — Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing.”