The 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded to ten winners tonight. The winners and their achievements are listed on the Ig Nobel Prize winners page. Additional detail is on the 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize web page. Here is video of the entire ceremony: You might enjoy also dipping into the press reports about […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Nihilism and hypergunk — Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism aren’t for everyone. Or maybe they are. Jonas Werner, a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, published a crisp, perhaps irresistible, 16-page-long jotting called “Irreducibly […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Fossil or beehive? — … And the snideness? That isn’t unusual, either. Nor is it new. In 1934, the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences printed a report called “The supposed fossil ear of maize from Cuzco, Peru”. Quantum […]
This video seems to invite analysis by anyone intrigued by the potential reaction of whoever who might be exposed to it. The video shows ten hours of repetition of the solo artist Konstrakta performing a musical piece called “In Corpore Sano”, representing Serbia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2022. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat Ten hours […]
In this 1968 video, pianist Glenn Gould plays bits of Wolfgang Mozart‘s musical compositions, and explains why he, Gould, feels that Mozart was a hack composer. Here’s a partial transcript of what Gould says: “That example came from Mozart’s piano concerto in C minor, one of the last works he produced in that form, one […]
In the hands of a scientist, musical instruments can do many sorts of things. This study tells how some instruments can be used to distinguish between different kinds of physical materials. “Musical Instruments as Sensors,” Heran C. Bhakta, Vamsi K. Choday, and William H. Grover, ACS Omega, vol. 3, 2018, pp. 11026−11032. The authors, at […]
The physics of musical saws, explored by Ig Nobel Prize winner Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, was profiled in the New York Times: “Now L. Mahadevan, a professor of physics and applied mathematics at Harvard, along with two colleagues, Suraj Shankar and Petur Bryde, has studied the way the saw produces music and drawn some conclusions that help […]
What can one conclude from playing music for a few stressed cats? A new study suggests the answer: “Evaluation of Music Therapy to Reduce Stress in Hospitalized Cats,” Juliane Eg Paz, Fernanda Va da Costa, Luciana N Nunes, Eduardo R Monteiro, and Jenifer Jung, Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, epub 2021. The authors, at […]
Very few popular music artists are the subject of exclusively dedicated peer-reviewed journals. There is, however, at least one – who features in the Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies (BOSS) It aims to publish scholarly, open-access, peer-reviewed essays pertaining to Bruce Springsteen. And seeks to encourage consideration of Springsteen’s body of work primarily through the […]
If you fancy dabbling on the stock market, you might want to keep an eye on the Spotify charts. According to new research from The London Business School, Auckland University of Technology and the Audencia Business School, the measures of positive or negative mood which the music download choices indicate : “ is positively correlated with […]