Category Physics

The 19th century philosopher Thomas Carlyle once declared, “Music is well said to be the speech of angels.”

One wonders what Tom would have thought about a later era serving up protopunk, death metal and gothic rock.

Moreover, what would he have had to say about current approaches to music composed not by angels but by CPUs, RAM and large language models?

Meta announced last week that it has developed an AI music processor that generates music based on natural language descriptions.

Meta’s MusicGen, which follows on the heels of Google’s January release of MusicLM that generates music based on text prompts or humming, was trained on 20,000 hours of music...

We’ve all played at least once with a spring toy, but did you know that light can be shaped like a spring too?

An international team of researchers, led by Marco Piccardo, a former researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and now a Professor in the Physics Department of Técnico Lisboa and Principal Investigator at the Engineering Institute for Microsystems and Nanotechnologies (INESC MN), has harnessed ultrafast optics and structured light to synthesize in the laboratory a new family of spatiotemporal light beams, known as light springs.

The research was done in collaboration between IIT, Politecnico di Milano and Téc...