If you're a rock 'n' roll fan, you already know Stewart Copeland. Drumming legend Copeland, Andy Summers and a guy named Sting romped to global stardom as the Police in the 1970s. So we were intrigued ...

This story is adapted from Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction, by David George Haskell. I first held a violin in my late forties.

To experiment with “playing” the strands of a web like the vibrating strings of a musical instrument, scientists at MIT used the web of a tropical tent-web spider (Cyrtophora citricola). A rattlesnake ...