The Ig Nobel Japan Tour — September 20-28

Please join us for any or all of the Ig Nobel events in Japan: Ig Nobel Japan Tour September 20, Thursday—Nerd Nite Tokyo, Nagatacho GRID, Tokyo, Japan.— A very jet-lagged Marc Abrahams will discuss the Ig Nobel Prizes. September 21, Friday— Special Pre-Show Press Opening of the Ig Nobel Exhibition—AaMo Gallery at the Tokyo Dome, Tokyo, Japan. —Marc Abrahams and several Ig Nobel Prize […]

Weight-lifting enhances museum exhibit appreciation (study)

Attn. museum curators! If you were to ask your visitors to lift heavy weights whilst looking at exhibits, would their esthetic pleasure and appreciative comprehension increase? A recent study, published in frontiers in Psychology suggests that ‘Weight lifting can facilitate appreciative comprehension for museum exhibits’.  A research team from Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan, asked 42 […]

Fictophones – a curiously unstable class of musical instruments?

    Does this video, showing sound sculptor Henry Dagg performing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ on a Faux-Katzenklavier of his own construction, qualify as a fictophonic collapse scenario? First, some background. Musicologists often like to categorise instruments into classes or groups. For example – idiophones (vibrating bodies), membranophones (vibrating membranes), chordophones (vibrating strings), aerophones (vibrating […]