1. Emacs -q
 2. M-x irc
 3. find out your nick by typing /me
 4. C-c C-q and input your nick there
 5. In the popup buffer type any utf-8 chars such as ♩♫

You may see something similar to the attached screenshot.

GNU Emacs 23.3.50.1 (x86_64-apple-darwin10.7.0, Carbon Version 1.6.0
 AppKit 1038.35) of 2011-05-27