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Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name any musical note without the use of a reference note. Given that genuine AP representations are based on the identification of isolated notes by their tone chroma, they are considered to be invariant to (1) surrounding tonal context, (2) changes in instrumental timbre, and (3) changes in octave register. However, there is considerable variability in the literature in terms of how AP is trained and tested along these dimensions, making recent claims about AP learning difficult to assess. Here, we examined the effect of tonal context on participant success with a single-note identification training paradigm, including how learning generalized to an untested instrument and octave. We found that participants were able to rapidly learn to distinguish C from other notes, with and without feedback and regardless of the tonal context in which C was presented. Participants were also able to partly generalize this skill to an untrained instrument. However, participants displayed the weakest generalization in recognizing C in a higher octave. The results indicate that participants were likely attending to pitch height in addition to pitch chroma – a conjecture that was supported by analyzing the pattern of response errors. These findings highlight the complex nature of note representation in AP, which requires note identification across contexts, going beyond the simple storage of a note fundamental. The importance of standardizing testing that spans both timbre and octave in assessing AP and further implications on past literature and future work are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present PuPl (Pu pillometry P ipel iner), an Octave-compatible library of Matlab functions for processing pupillometry data with an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI). PuPl's preprocessing tools include blink correction, data smoothing, and gaze correction. PuPl can also define and sort trials, and segment data to isolate event-related pupil dilation responses. PuPl's flexible tabular export tools enable a wide variety of statistical analyses. Furthermore, PuPl can translate GUI interactions into a Matlab script, enabling easy creation and reconfiguration of reusable data processing pipelines. Finally, PuPl is designed to be extensible, and users can easily contribute functionality as best practices for pupillometry evolve. Here we demonstrate PuPl by replicating published results using publicly available data. PuPl can be downloaded from github.com/kinleyid/pupl. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The universal period-tripling system has been discovered in various astronomical, geophysical, and biological phenomena in the range of periods from 1.64 billion years to 50 years; we then confirmed its existence on a scale of up to 10–15 seconds based on examples of human memory and hearing, several technical and medical devices, and, finally, in the settings of human and animal vision. This unprecedented multiscale discrete spectrum of periods has been studied thus far exclusively on the basis of literature data; as a result, it has been shown that many systems of a diverse nature, including the most common ones, operate against the background of a dimensionless spectrum of ~3k/2m periods. This is close to the spectrum of a stochastic attractor, which gives a Pythagorean musical octave. We confirm the result of this phenomenological generalization experimentally by testing various generators of electrical oscillations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water surface visualization is an important research topic in computer graphics. This paper presents a novel method of water surface simulation by Secondary Distorted Textures (SDT), which realistically simulates and visualizes the reflection and refraction of calm water in real-time using current consumer-level hardware. The proposed method renders water surface using two stages of texture maps. 1. The first texture map stores the 3D geometries’ perspective reflection with respect to 3D perspective view; 2. The second texture map stores the distortion results of the first reflection map with lighting effects. Perlin noise is used to generate random height map. Reflection and refraction are obtained and stored in the secondary distorted texture map with Fresnel effects for each frame. At rendering pass, the SDT is directly tiled on water surface. This paper also discussed the rendering of transparent geometry, which have view-dependent of lighting effects features. Experimental results demonstrated that our method can render realistic geometry nearby dynamic water surface at the frame rates of 70-100 FPS by NVIDIA Quadro k5000 graphic card. The existing texture mapping and bump mapping methods were compared for illustrating that our method produced high realistic water surface without aliasing reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient Matlab codes in 2D and 3D have been proposed recently to assemble finite element matrices. In this paper we present simple, compact and efficient vectorized algorithms, which are variants of these codes, in arbitrary dimension, without the use of any lower level language. They can be easily implemented in many vector languages (e.g. Matlab, Octave, Python, R, Julia, Scilab, C++ with STL,...). The principle of these techniques is general, we present it for the assembly of several finite element matrices in arbitrary dimension, in the $${{\mathbb {P}}_{1}}$$ finite element case. We also provide an extension of the algorithms to the case of a system of PDE's. Then we give an extension to piecewise polynomials of higher order. We compare numerically the performance of these algorithms in Matlab, Octave and Python, with that in FreeFEM++ and in a compiled language such as C. Examples show that, unlike what is commonly believed, the performance is not radically worse than that of C : in the best/worst cases, selected vector languages are respectively 2.3/3.5 and 2.9/4.1 times slower than C in the scalar and vector cases. We also present numerical results which illustrate the computational costs of these algorithms compared to standard algorithms and to other recent ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This survey paper describes the Network Computing Laboratory (NCLab), a novel public cloud computing platform for mathematics, programming, scientific computing and computer simulations. Through a web-browser interface, it provides users with free access to interactive graphical modules that include symbolic and numerical methods, programming in several languages, computing with Python scientific libraries, computing with GNU Octave, GPU computing with CUDA, computational geometry, 3D CAD design, computational graph theory, finite element programming with the Hermes library, and interactive graphical finite element modules. Users can upload files and data from their local computers, clone projects from the database, share files, form teams, and collaborate on projects. This paper briefly describes how NCLab operates, and it provides concise descriptions of NCLab computational modules with examples of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss implementation aspects of a software-defined radio system that allows the user to define waveforms using an algebraic language interface, currently as an extension to C++. Current software-defined radio systems provide waveform definitions through a combination of a graphical interface, markup language, interpreted script, and compiled code. Regardless of the methods used, the actual executed code generates each waveform via a series of graph-style connections: instantiating blocks and then explicitly connecting ports between blocks. We propose a system that allows the definition of waveforms using a novel text-based algebraic language interface similar to that found in MathWorks MATLAB or GNU Octave. Our system simplifies the waveform programming abstraction by using implicit graph-style connections; it makes extensive use of C++ templates and operator overloading to allow this high-level abstraction. Our interface is solely an abstraction layer providing an alternative means for coding waveforms in comparison to current techniques, and hence has no more overhead than current techniques. Example code is provided to compare and contrast various methods of waveform definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]