A dummy head (or Kunstkopf) is sometimes used to create ‘binaural’ recordings. There can however, be a problem with this approach – in the sense that from the listener’s point of view, it’s not always completely clear which way is the head facing, could it be back to front? Researchers at the Virtual Acoustics and […]
Tag: Sound
A Gastropod taste and listen to electro-acoustical modified Pringles-crunching
The Gastropod podcast (perhaps the most delicious of all podcasts) tastes the taste-and-sound experimental research of 2008 Ig Nobel Prize winner Charles Spence. Here’s a snippet, in print form: “Food and drink are among life’s most multisensory experiences,” Spence pointed out, so it’s perhaps hardly surprising that it occurred to him that the parchment skin illusion might […]
Sonifications in the control room
Those whose work involves monitoring highly complex industrial procedues sometimes have difficulty attending to several concurrent processes (at the same time). To this end : “Computer scientists at the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interactive Technology (CITEC) at Bielefeld University and the University of Vienna have developed a method that allows control room staff to monitor […]
The sound of flavor: A review of the research
Ig Nobel Prize winner Charles Spence, of Oxford University, has published a new study that reviews much of the research about the flavor of food. The study is: “Eating with our ears: assessing the importance of the sounds of consumption on our perception and enjoyment of multisensory flavour experiences,” Charles Spence, Flavour, vol. 4, no. […]
Science, technology, and potato-chip-related sound
Sounds related to potato chips are again inspiring scientific innovation. THEN: The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for nutrition was awarded to Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper […]
Acoustical delight: The sound of coffee roasting
Many scientists having probed the smell of coffee, one, at least, is probing its sound. He has published a study about it: “Coffee Roasting Acoustics,” Preston S. Wilson [pictured here], Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 135, no. 6, 2014. (Thanks to investigator Daniela Müller for bringing this to our attention.) The author, […]
On the up and up: levitating particles & a frog, with sound & magnets
Two visual demonstrations of levitation, each using known physics properties: 1. Using sound waves to levitate particles [REFERENCE: “Three-dimensional Mid-air Acoustic Manipulation by Ultrasonic Phased Arrays,” Yoichi Ochiai, Takayuki Hoshi, Jun Rekimoto, (2013) arXiv:1312.4006.. Thanks to @BetsytheDevine for bringing this to our attention.]: 2. The Ig Nobel Prize-winning levitation of a frog, using magnets [REFERENCE: “Of […]
Perception, and the modification of toffee’s environs
Layla Eplett, in the Food Matters blog, explores a new study by Ig Nobel Prize winner Charles Spence: “Each volunteer was given four pieces of toffee. Two pieces were eaten accompanied by a soundtrack of a lower pitched brass instruments. The remaining toffee was consumed listening to a high pitched piano piece. The result was […]
Ig Nobel winners on display in Hakodate July 1
Two of the most eloquent Ig Nobel Prize winners will give free public talks at Future University Hakodate, Japan, on July 1, starting at 6:30 pm: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, winner of two Ig Nobel Prizes for his (and his colleagues’) various experiments with slime mold Koji Tsukada, co-inventor of the SpeechJammer, a machine that disrupts a person’s […]
The sound of the taste of your coffee
The Edible Geography blog tells of an innovatively intense, focused approach to listening to people eat: …in a paper to be published in June 2013 in the journal Food Hydrocolloids, scientist George A. Van Aken of NIZO, a Dutch food research company, reveals a new method of measuring mouthfeel: the wonderfully named “acoustic tribology.” Van Aken took a tiny […]