Inter-subject Correlation While Listening to Minimalist Music: A Study of Electrophysiological and Behavioral Responses to Steve Reich's Piano Phase

Musical minimalism utilizes the temporal manipulation of restricted collections of rhythmic, melodic, and/or harmonic materials. One example, Steve Reich's Piano Phase, offers listeners readily audible formal structure with unpredictable events at the local level. For example, pattern recurrences may generate strong expectations which are violated by small temporal and pitch deviations. A hyper-detailed listening strategy prompted by these minute deviations stands in contrast to the type of listening engagement typically cultivated around functional tonal Western music. Recent research has suggested that the inter-subject correlation (ISC) of electroencephalographic (EEG) responses to natural audio-visual stimuli objectively indexes a state of “engagement,” demonstrating the potential of this approach for analyzing music listening. But can ISCs capture engagement with minimalist music, which features less obvious expectation formation and has historically received a wide range of reactions? To approach this question, we collected EEG and continuous behavioral (CB) data while 30 adults listened to an excerpt from Steve Reich's Piano Phase, as well as three controlled manipulations and a popular-music remix of the work. Our analyses reveal that EEG and CB ISC are highest for the remix stimulus and lowest for our most repetitive manipulation, no statistical differences in overall EEG ISC between our most musically meaningful manipulations and Reich's original piece, and evidence that compositional features drove engagement in time-resolved ISC analyses. We also found that aesthetic evaluations corresponded well with overall EEG ISC. Finally we highlight co-occurrences between stimulus events and time-resolved EEG and CB ISC. We offer the CB paradigm as a useful analysis measure and note the value of minimalist compositions as a limit case for the neuroscientific study of music listening. Overall, our participants' neural, continuous behavioral, and question responses showed strong similarities that may help refine our understanding of the type of engagement indexed by ISC for musical stimuli.

‘La Main négative’: Limit-Case and Primal Scene of Art

Negative handprints or hand-stencils, which occur in many prehistoric sites around the world, occupy a particular place in accounts of rock art. Although they frequently occur alongside paintings, their indexical status as imprints leads them to be treated separately from other types of representations that are more easily accepted as such. This article argues that the negative handprint operates as a kind of limit-case for definitions of art. I examine how it has given rise to imagined scenarios of making — what we might call primal scenes of art — by writers including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Marguerite Duras. While its logic of presence invites us to think about it as a point of origin, a trace that connects us to our earliest human ancestors, I show how it can be read against that logic of presence through the lens of one particular ‘primal scene’, that imagined by Jean-Luc Nancy. In this reading, it is precisely the question of absence or distance that gives the handprint its status as a point of origin that undoes the very idea of origins.

Barbero–Immirzi value from experiment

We consider general relativity as a limit case of the scalar–tensor theory with Barbero–Immirzi (BI) field when the field tends to a constant. We use Shapiro time delay experimental value of [Formula: see text] provided by the Cassini spacecraft to find the present BI parameter value.

Resonant Collisions Among Two-Dimensional Localized Waves in the Mel'nikov Equation

We study the resonant collisions among different types of localized solitary waves in the Mel'nikov equation, which are described by exact solutions constructed using Hirota's direct method. The elastic collisions among different solitary waves can be transformed into resonant collisions when the phase shifts of these solitary waves tend to infinity . First, we study the resonant collision among a breather and a dark line soliton. We obtain two collision scenarios: (i) the breather is semi-localized in space and is not localized in time when it obliquely intersects with the dark line soliton, and (ii) the breather is semi-localized in time and is not localized in space when it parallelly intersects with the dark line soliton. The resonant collision of a lump and a dark line soliton, as the limit case of resonant collision of a breather and a dark line soliton, shows the fusing process of the lump into the dark line soliton. Then we investigate the resonant collision among a breather and two dark line solitons. In this evolution process we also obtain two dynamical behaviors: (iii) when the breather and the two dark line solitons obliquely intersect each other we get that the breather is completely localized in space and is not localized in time, and (iv) when the breather and the two dark line solitons are parallel to each other, we get that the breather is completely localized in time and is not localized in space. The resonant collision of a lump and two dark line solitons is obtained as the limit case of the resonant collision among a breather and two dark line solitons. In this special case the lump first detaches from a dark line soliton and then disappears into the other dark line soliton. Eventually, we also investigate the intriguing phenomenon that when a resonant collision among a breather and four dark line solitons occurs, we get the interesting situation that two of the four dark line solitons are degenerate and the corresponding solution displays the same shape as that of the resonant collision among a breather and two dark line solitons, except for the phase shifts of the solitons, which are not only dependent of the parameters controlling the waveforms of the solitons and the breather, but also dependent of some parameters irrelevant to the waveforms.

The World as a Quantum Information Processor

It is impossible to fully grasp reality and the universe without a sound understanding of quantum science, i.e. theory. The aim of this paper is twofold, namely first presenting what quantum information processing consists of, and then consequently discussing the implications of quantum science to the understanding of reality. I shall claim that the world is fully quantum, and the classical world is but a limit case of the quantum world. The crux of the argument is that quantum information can be taken as a living phenomenon. Quantum information processing (QIP) has been mainly the subject of computational approaches. Here we take it as the way in which information allows for a non-dualistic explanation of the world. In this sense, quantum information processing consists in understanding how entanglement stands as the ground for a coherent reality yet highly dynamical, vibrant and vivid. Information, I argue, is a living phenomenon that creates itself out of nothing. Quantum information is a relational view of entities, systems, phenomena, and events (Auletta, 2005).

Dual addition formulas: the case of continuous q-ultraspherical and q-Hermite polynomials

We settle the dual addition formula for continuous q-ultraspherical polynomials as an expansion in terms of special q-Racah polynomials for which the constant term is given by the linearization formula for the continuous q-ultraspherical polynomials. In a second proof we derive the dual addition formula from the Rahman–Verma addition formula for these polynomials by using the self-duality of the polynomials. We also consider the limit case of continuous q-Hermite polynomials.

Inter-Subject Correlation during New Music Listening: A Study of Electrophysiological and Behavioral Responses to Steve Reich’s Piano Phase

Musical minimalism utilizes the temporal manipulation of restricted collections of rhythmic, melodic, and/or harmonic materials. One example, Steve Reich’s Piano Phase, offers listeners readily audible formal structures containing unpredictable events at local levels. Pattern recurrences may generate strong expectations which are violated by small temporal and pitch deviations. A hyper-detailed listening strategy prompted by these minute deviations stands in contrast to the type of listening engagement typically cultivated around functional tonal Western music. Recent research has suggested that the inter-subject correlation (ISC) of electroencephalographic (EEG) responses to natural audio-visual stimuli objectively indexes a state of “engagement”, demonstrating the potential of this approach for analyzing music listening. But can ISCs capture engagement with minimal music, which features less obvious expectation formation and has historically received a wide range of reactions? To approach this question, we collected EEG and continuous behavioral (CB) data while 30 adults listened to an excerpt from Steve Reich’s Piano Phase, as well as three controlled manipulations and a popular-music remix of the work. Our analyses reveal that EEG and CB ISC are highest for the remix stimulus and lowest for our most repetitive manipulation. In addition, we found no statistical differences in overall EEG ISC between our most musically meaningful manipulations and Reich’s original piece. We also found that aesthetic evaluations corresponded well with overall EEG ISC. Finally we highlight co-occurrences between stimulus events and time-resolved EEG and CB ISC. We offer the CB paradigm as a useful analysis measure and note the value of minimalist compositions as a limit case for studying music listening using EEG ISC. We show that ISC is less effective at measuring engagement with this minimalist stimulus than with popular music genres and argue that this may be due to a difference between the type of engagement measured by ISC and the particular engagement patterns associated with minimalism.

Stability of Systems of Fractional-Order Differential Equations with Caputo Derivatives

Systems of fractional-order differential equations present stability properties which differ in a substantial way from those of systems of integer order. In this paper, a detailed analysis of the stability of linear systems of fractional differential equations with Caputo derivative is proposed. Starting from the well-known Matignon’s results on stability of single-order systems, for which a different proof is provided together with a clarification of a limit case, the investigation is moved towards multi-order systems as well. Due to the key role of the Mittag–Leffler function played in representing the solution of linear systems of FDEs, a detailed analysis of the asymptotic behavior of this function and of its derivatives is also proposed. Some numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the main results.

Analytical treatment of the transient motion of inertial beams attached to coupling inertial resonators

This paper presents, for the first time, an analytical formulation to determine the transient response of an elastic beam possessing distributed inertia and connected to a coupling inertial resonator, represented by a gyroscopic spinner. The latter couples the transverse displacement components of the beam in the two perpendicular directions, thus producing roto-flexural vibrations. A detailed parametric study is presented that illustrates the effects of the beam’s distributed inertia and of the resonator’s characteristics. The limit case of massless beam is examined and it is shown that in some situations the distributed inertia in the beam should not be neglected. Analytical results are also validated by finite element computations. An illustration is also presented that demonstrates the effectiveness of using the considered inertial devices to mitigate hazardous vibrations in structural systems. It is envisaged that this paper may be useful in the analysis of flexural waveguides and metamaterials consisting of inertial elastic beam elements.

World Literature, the opaque archive, and the untranslatable: J. M. Coetzee and some others

A key concern of recent theoretical orientations in the development of “World Literature” as a discipline has been the question of accessibility to literatures in minor languages, which is to say of literal and metaphorical translatability, even transparency. This essay explores the challenge posed by the occlusion of the possible intertextual influence of works in such languages that are evident only as a trace in texts that now seem indisputably part of a canon of World Literature. What happens when the engagement of writers in this canon with cultural production in languages adjacent to those in which they themselves principally operate is not evident to an increasingly global community of scholars, and perhaps not even evidenced in an author’s archive (whether this is understood to be a material collection or indeed a virtual space conceptualized as the literary ecosystem in which an author has developed)? This essay addresses these questions with reference to the work of South African-born Nobel Prize-winning writer J. M. Coetzee, and to the problem posed by some of his work’s (and his archive’s) others, here specifically Afrikaners and the work of Afrikaans-language writers. This consideration has implications not only for the current shape of Coetzee studies, but for that of World Literature more broadly, presenting something of a limit-case for the translation metaphor that directs some of its formulations as disciplinary field.