Happy New Year!

2007 - The year with a licence to kill!
In Sydney, perhaps we were referring to "Diamonds Are Forever"?

(Photo by James Bridgewood)

New Years Eve Photo galleries at SMH
World celebrations; Sydney midnight; Sydney early fireworks

Wired for Sound (is the cliche headline)

Music of the Hemispheres
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 31, 2006
www.nytimes.com/ 2006/ 12/ 31/ arts/ music/ 31thom.html

Why are we so good at recognizing music?”
... Dr. Daniel Levitin has devoted his career to exploring this question. He is a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal, perhaps the world’s leading lab in probing why music has such an intense effect on us.

“By the age of 5 we are all musical experts, so this stuff is clearly wired really deeply into us,” said Dr. Levitin, ... surrounded by the pianos, guitars and enormous 16-track mixers that make his lab look more like a recording studio.

Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, he recently published a layperson’s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music,“This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton).