Alpha band modulation caused by selective attention to music enables EEG classification.

Humans are able to pay selective attention to music or speech in the presence of multiple sounds. It has been reported that in the speech domain, selective attention enhances the cross-correlation between the envelope of speech and electroencephalogram (EEG) while also affecting the spatial modulation of the alpha band. However, when multiple music pieces are performed at the same time, it is unclear how selective attention affects neural entrainment and spatial modulation. In this paper, we hypothesized that the entrainment to the attended music differs from that to the unattended music and that spatial modulation in the alpha band occurs in conjunction with attention. We conducted experiments in which we presented musical excerpts to 15 participants, each listening to two excerpts simultaneously but paying attention to one of the two. The results showed that the cross-correlation function between the EEG signal and the envelope of the unattended melody had a more prominent peak than that of the attended melody, contrary to the findings for speech. In addition, the spatial modulation in the alpha band was found with a data-driven approach called the common spatial pattern method. Classification of the EEG signal with a support vector machine identified attended melodies and achieved an accuracy of 100% for 11 of the 15 participants. These results suggest that selective attention to music suppresses entrainment to the melody and that spatial modulation of the alpha band occurs in conjunction with attention. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report to detect attended music consisting of several types of music notes only with EEG.

Speckle holographic imaging of a sound field using Fresnel lenses.

In this Letter, we propose to use Fresnel lenses for holographic sound-field imaging. Although a Fresnel lens has never been used for sound-field imaging mainly due to its low imaging quality, it has several desired properties, including thinness, lightweight, low cost, and ease of making a large aperture. We constructed an optical holographic imaging system composed of two Fresnel lenses used for magnification and demagnification of the illuminating beam. A proof-of-concept experiment verified that the sound-field imaging with Fresnel lenses is possible by using the spatiotemporally harmonic nature of sound.

Low-noise optical measurement of sound using midfringe locked interferometer with differential detection.

A midfringe locked interferometer with differential detection is proposed for non-contact optical sound measurement, and the equivalent noise level of approximately 0 dB SPL/Hz is achieved. The noise level of the proposed method is 30 dB lower than that of a very recent laser Doppler vibrometer and close to that of a quarter-inch measurement microphone. The midfringe locking stabilizes the optical interferometer against slow environmental fluctuations and enables detection of the acoustic signal directly from optical intensity. The differential detection method eliminates laser intensity noise, which is a dominant noise source in optical interferometers. The noise level of the constructed system was approximately 10 dB above the optical shot-noise (the classical detection limit attributed to the quantum nature of light) at frequencies higher than 2 kHz. Further noise reduction by several available methods could lead to optical measurements that are more sensitive than measurements by microphones. In addition, the constructed interferometer is used to reconstruct sound fields generated by a half-inch laboratory standard microphone used as a transmitter. The proposed method will be a powerful tool for measuring small-amplitude sound fields where it has been challenging to use existing methods.

Spurious-sound-free measurement of parametric acoustic array using optical interferometry.

When measuring a parametric acoustic array (PAA) with a microphone, the sound often suffers from so-called spurious sound, the noise generated by the nonlinearity of the microphone. This paper proposes a spurious-sound-free measurement method for a PAA using optical interferometry and Gaussian beam expansion. Comparison between the proposed method and numerical simulation by the finite element method confirmed that the proposed method measures the demodulated audio sound without any effect from spurious sound.

Cavity analysis on the robustness of random networks against targeted attacks: Influences of degree-degree correlations.

We developed a scheme for evaluating the size of the largest connected subnetwork (giant component) in random networks and the percolation threshold when sites (nodes) and/or bonds (edges) are removed from the networks based on the cavity method of statistical mechanics of disordered systems. We apply our scheme particularly to random networks of bimodal degree distribution (two-peak networks), which have been proposed in earlier studies as robust networks against random failures of site and/or targeted (random degree-dependent) attacks on sites. Our analysis indicates that the correlations among degrees affect a network's robustness against targeted attacks on sites or bonds nontrivially depending on details of network configurations.