Is karaoke a passing fad? Kevin Brown PhD. Associate Professor of Theatre History, Theory, Criticism, Performance Studies, New Media, Non-Western Theatre, and Popular Culture at the University of Missouri, US. believes not. For his doctoral dissertation, he conducted a two-year ethnographic study of karaoke in America, a portion of which is: ‘Liveness Anxiety: Karaoke and the Performance of Class‘, and is published in Vol. 1, Issue 2, of the academic journal Popular Entertainment Studies.

“It is very tempting to dismiss karaoke as a passing fad.”

explains the professor.

“Considerable work exists to describe the functions of yeah.” explain authors Chad D. Nilep and colleague Tamara Grivičić from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado. And there has also been some academic research investigating the so-called ‘Creaky Voice’. But the team’s study is one of the very first to investigate the two together (i.e. Yeah + Creaky Voice).

For aesthetic reasons, plastic surgeons are sometimes required to re-position male nipples – after dramatic weight-loss for example. In such a case they are presented, in effect, with a substantially blank canvas. But the presently accepted methods for calculating ideal nipple locations are far from straightforward.

“Currently available guidelines create areolas that are too large, place the nipple-areola complex too high and too far medially, and/or require complex abstract mathematical calculations.”

Does subglottal resonance have a significant influence on register transition when singing falsetto? To find out, investigators at the University of Iowa decided on an innovative approach – involving helium. Or, more accurately, Helox (a.k.a. Heliox) a mixture of helium and oxygen [see safety note below].
Because helium is considerably less dense than normal air mixtures, the vocal resonant frequencies of those who breathe it tend to be higher – suggesting a possible application in falsetto research.

Reference: see this video of Lionel Ritchie singing ‘Hello’ (with helium).

“Our results raise important questions about our representation of tastes and flavors and could also lead to applications in the marketing of food products.”

- say a research team who have been investigating possible associations between flavors and various musical instruments. The Crossmodal Research Lab at Oxford University in the UK have presented their paper : ‘As bitter as a trombone: Synesthetic correspondences in nonsynesthetes between tastes/flavors and musical notes’ in a recent issue of the journal Attention Perception&Psychophysics.

“Under what conditions can we engage in a meaningful, expressive interaction with an electronic device?” Say, for example, by ‘tickling’ a robot?

This question is examined in a recent article by Patrizia Marti, assistant professor and senior lecturer at the Department of Communication Science, University of Siena, Siena, Italy, which features in the International Journal of Design.