Starbucks, the widespread purveyor of coffee, announced that the work of 2008 Ig Nobel Prize winner Charles Spence (who was honored for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is) inspired them to create a sort of […]
Tag: Sound
Perception of Electric Toothbrushes
“The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perception of Electric Toothbrushes,” Massimiliano Zampini, S. Guest, and Charles Spence, Journal of Dental Research, vol. 82, no. 11, 2003, pp. 929–32. Zampini and Spence were awarded the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in nutrition for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person […]
Tissue paper, for audio engineers
Audio engineers can, famously, be finicky in selecting the very most right equipment for a task. Investigator Julia Lunetta alerts us to a report about one instance of this: Examining the Yamaha NS-10M “Tissue Paper Phenomenon” An Analysis of the Industry-Wide Practice of Using a Tissue-Paper Layer to Reduce High-Frequency Output by Bob Hodas …As […]
Forceful hair-combing measured
In 1966, hair combing made noise on both sides of the Atlantic – musical noise to the east, scientific to the west. In England, the Beatles released a song that said: “Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”. In America, William C Waggoner and George V Scott of the Colgate-Palmolive […]