Science Says Bassists are Important, is Wrong

In what I can only assume is part of a scheme by a bassist to finally get laid, McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada has published a study claiming that these “musicians” are important. From Mic.com:

“Last year, researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, found that there’s a reason why bass lines tend to fill out the background of a song, leaving the theatrics to higher-pitched instruments. Our brains are far better suited to establishing a song’s rhythmic feel if they occur in lower tones.

“Laurel Trainor, the study’s lead author, hooked up participants to an EEG to monitor brain activity while they heard simultaneous streams of two piano notes — one high-pitched, the other low-pitched. Every so often researchers played one of the notes fractions of a second too early. Participants were far better at recognizing these errors if they occurred in the bass notes. That same study also found that, if asked to tap their fingers along to this unpredictable stream of notes, subjects were much better at adjusting their tapping when the lower tones began to arrive early than they were if the same thing happened with the higher tones.”

Which sounds legit, until you consider that this study is based on the wholly unreliable institution known as “science,” which routinely makes dumb assertions for which it eventually has to apologize: the world is flat, the sun goes around the earth, global warming is a real thing, etc. So I don’t think anybody needs to feel compelled to take this seriously.

Nice try, bassists. You dummies.

[via Metal Injection]