Show Statistics - Musikmesse and Prolight+Sound closed with113,000 visitors from 142 countries (2012: 109,481 visitors, 120 countries). "This visitor response has far surpassed our own expectations and that of the exhibitors", says Detlef Braun, managing director of Messe Frankfurt GmbH. "With 113,000, the visitor numbers not only exceeded last year's results by three percent, but it also surpasses the all-time record high from 2009 (112,478 visitors). This is a fantastic result for these two innovative and very market-active industry sectors at their leading shows here in Frankfurt am Main." The next Musikmesse and Prolight+Sound will take place in Frankfurt am Main from 12 to 15 March 2014.
Musicians on Track - The young musicians who played Nimrod at the London 2012 opening ceremony are among the nominees at this year's Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards. The London Symphony Orchestra's LSO On Track initiative saw 80 young musicians perform Elgar's ninth Enigma variation at the start of the 27 July ceremony. LSO On Track will be contesting for the learning and participation prize at the awards, to be held in London on 14 May. Opera star Bryn Terfel is among the big names nominated in other categories. The Welsh bass-baritone is up for the singer prize, alongside the English mezzo-sopranos Alice Coote and Sarah Connolly and the US tenor Bryan Hymel.
Mind Music - Listening to new music is rewarding for the brain, a study suggests. Using MRI scans, a Canadian team of scientists found that areas in the reward centre of the brain became active when people heard a song for the first time. The more the listener enjoyed what they were hearing, the stronger the connections were in the region of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. The study is published in the journal Science.
Dr Valorie Salimpoor, from the Rotman Research Institute, in Toronto, told the BBC's Science in Action programme, "We know that the nucleus accumbens is involved with reward. But music is abstract: It's not like you are really hungry and you are about to get a piece of food and you are really excited about it because you are going to eat it - or the same thing applies to sex or money - that's when you would normally see activity in the nucleus accumbens. But what's cool is that you're anticipating and getting excited over something entirely abstract - and that's the next sound that is coming up."
(Jim Evans)
