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Periodicity and frequency coding in human auditory cortex
Understanding the neural coding of pitch and frequency is fundamental to the understanding of speech comprehension, music perception and the segregation of concurrent sound sources. Neuroimaging has made important contributions to defining the pattern of frequency sensitivity in humans. However, the precise way in which pitch sensitivity relates to these frequency-dependent regions remains unclear. Single-frequency tones also cannot be used to test this hypothesis as their pitch always equals their frequency. Here, temporal pitch (periodicity) and frequency coding were dissociated using stimuli that were bandpassed in different frequency spectra (centre frequencies 800 and 4500 Hz), yet were matched in their pitch characteristics. Cortical responses to both pitch-evoking stimuli typically occurred within a region that was also responsive to low frequencies. Its location extended across both primary and nonprimary auditory cortex. An additional control experiment demonstrated that this pitch-related effect was not simply caused by the generation of combination tones. Our findings support recent neurophysiological evidence for a cortical representation of pitch at the lateral border of the primary auditory cortex, while revealing new evidence that additional auditory fields are also likely to play a role in pitch coding
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Harmony and Technology Enhanced Learning
New technologies offer rich opportunities to support education in harmony. In this chapter we consider theoretical perspectives and underlying principles behind technologies for learning and teaching harmony. Such perspectives help in matching existing and future technologies to educational purposes, and to inspire the creative re-appropriation of technologies
How to make a clean separation between CMB E and B modes with proper foreground masking
We investigate the E/B decomposition of CMB polarization on a masked sky. In
real space, operators of E and B mode decomposition involve only differentials
of CMB polarization. We may, therefore in principle, perform a clean E/B
decomposition from incomplete sky data. Since it is impractical to apply second
derivatives to observation data, we usually rely on spherical harmonic
transformation and inverse transformation, instead of using real-space
operators. In spherical harmonic representation, jump discontinuities in a cut
sky produces Gibbs phenomenon, unless a spherical harmonic expansion is made up
to an infinitely high multipole. By smoothing a foreground mask, we may
suppress the Gibbs phenomenon effectively in a similar manner to apodization of
a foreground mask discussed in other works. However, we incur foreground
contamination by smoothing a foreground mask, because zero-value pixels in the
original mask may be rendered non-zero by the smoothing process. In this work,
we investigate an optimal foreground mask, which ensures proper foreground
masking and suppresses Gibbs phenomenon. We apply our method to a simulated map
of the pixel resolution comparable to the Planck satellite. The simulation
shows that the leakage power is lower than unlensed CMB B mode power spectrum
of tensor-to-scalar ratio . We compare the result with
that of the original mask. We find that the leakage power is reduced by a
factor of at the cost of a sky fraction , and that
the enhancement is highest at lowest multipoles. We confirm that all the
zero-value pixels in the original mask remain zero in our mask. The application
of this method to the Planck data will improve the detectability of primordial
tensor perturbation.Comment: v2: typos corrected, v3: matched with the published version (the
clarity improved) v4: a typo corrected v5: a bibliography file error fixe
Hidden solitons in the Zabusky-Kruskal experiment: Analysis using the periodic, inverse scattering transform
Recent numerical work on the Zabusky--Kruskal experiment has revealed,
amongst other things, the existence of hidden solitons in the wave profile.
Here, using Osborne's nonlinear Fourier analysis, which is based on the
periodic, inverse scattering transform, the hidden soliton hypothesis is
corroborated, and the \emph{exact} number of solitons, their amplitudes and
their reference level is computed. Other "less nonlinear" oscillation modes,
which are not solitons, are also found to have nontrivial energy contributions
over certain ranges of the dispersion parameter. In addition, the reference
level is found to be a non-monotone function of the dispersion parameter.
Finally, in the case of large dispersion, we show that the one-term nonlinear
Fourier series yields a very accurate approximate solution in terms of Jacobian
elliptic functions.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures (9 images); v2: minor revision, version accepted
for publication in Math. Comput. Simula
Discovery of luminous pulsed hard X-ray emission from anomalous X-ray pulsars 1RXS J1708-4009, 4U 0142+61 and 1E 2259+586 by INTEGRAL and RXTE
We report on the discovery of hard spectral tails for energies above 10 keV
in the total and pulsed spectra of anomalous X-ray pulsars 1RXS J1708-4009, 4U
0142+61 and 1E 2259+586 using RXTE PCA (2-60 keV) and HEXTE (15-250 keV) data
and INTEGRAL IBIS ISGRI (20-300 keV) data. Improved spectral information on 1E
1841-045 is presented. The pulsed and total spectra measured above 10 keV have
power-law shapes and there is so far no significant evidence for spectral
breaks or bends up to ~150 keV. The pulsed spectra are exceptionally hard with
indices measured for 4 AXPs approximately in the range -1.0 -- 1.0. We also
reanalyzed archival CGRO COMPTEL (0.75-30 MeV) data to search for signatures
from our set of AXPs. No detections can be claimed, but the obtained
upper-limits in the MeV band indicate that for 1RXS J1708-4009, 4U 0142+61 and
1E 1841-045 strong breaks must occur somewhere between 150 and 750 keV.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 19 pages; 4 Tables; 15 Figures (6
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Iterative Residual Fitting for Spherical Harmonic Transform of Band-Limited Signals on the Sphere: Generalization and Analysis
We present the generalized iterative residual fitting (IRF) for the
computation of the spherical harmonic transform (SHT) of band-limited signals
on the sphere. The proposed method is based on the partitioning of the subspace
of band-limited signals into orthogonal subspaces. There exist sampling schemes
on the sphere which support accurate computation of SHT. However, there are
applications where samples~(or measurements) are not taken over the predefined
grid due to nature of the signal and/or acquisition set-up. To support such
applications, the proposed IRF method enables accurate computation of SHTs of
signals with randomly distributed sufficient number of samples. In order to
improve the accuracy of the computation of the SHT, we also present the
so-called multi-pass IRF which adds multiple iterative passes to the IRF. We
analyse the multi-pass IRF for different sampling schemes and for different
size partitions. Furthermore, we conduct numerical experiments to illustrate
that the multi-pass IRF allows sufficiently accurate computation of SHTs.Comment: 5 Pages, 7 Figure
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