A concert pianist is able to produce a wide range of imaginable nuances of musical expression by actuating the 88 keys on a piano, none of which travel through a distance greater than one centimeter. In this study, we investigated the temporal behaviour of grand piano actions from different manufacturers using different types of touch (‘legato’ versus ‘staccato’). An experimental setup consisti...

The recording and reproducing capabilities of a Yamaha Disklavier grand piano and a Bösendorfer SE290 computer-controlled grand piano were tested, with the goal of examining their reliability for performance research. An experimental setup consisting of accelerometers and a calibrated microphone was used to capture key and hammer movements, as well as the acoustic signal. Five selected keys wer...

Headache, vomiting ana papilloedema, these according to Wheeler & Jack's Handbook of Medicine, were the cardinal features of cerebral tumour, but the authors quickly tired of the subject after a page or two, and not knowing what papilloedema was, so did we, clinical clerks in the early thirties fresh from the Medical School with our new stethoscopes and clean white coats. Looking back, this was...

Automatic music transcription has attracted a great interest from computer scientists and musicians for more than thirty-five years. The process of transcription includes extraction of fundamental frequencies, and segmentation of the continuous audio signal by detecting onsets and offsets of sound events. In a following step, quantization of pitch and timing gives a symbolic representation of t...

The sounds accompanying electrophonic burster meteors are characteristically described as being akin to short duration “pops” and staccato–like “clicks”. As a phenomenon distinct from the enduring electrophonic sounds that occasionally accompany the passage and ablation of large meteoroids in the Earth’s lower atmosphere, the bursters have proved stubbornly difficult to explain. A straightforwa...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Published reports of controlled experiments designed to evaluate the performance of over-the-wire microcatheter systems are rare and have often been based on subjective impressions from small clinical series. This investigation was designed to compare the load forces required to propel state-of-the-art, hydrophilically coated microcatheters from each of four manufacturers...

Background sounds, such as narration, music with prominent staccato passages, and office noise impair verbal short-term memory even when these sounds are irrelevant. This irrelevant sound effect (ISE) is evoked by so-called changing-state sounds that are characterized by a distinct temporal structure with varying successive auditory-perceptive tokens. However, because of the absence of an appro...

Plasmodium sporozoites, the infective stage of the malaria parasite, move by gliding motility, a unique form of locomotion required for tissue migration and host cell invasion. TRAP, a transmembrane protein with extracellular adhesive domains and a cytoplasmic tail linked to the actomyosin motor, is central to this process. Forward movement is achieved when TRAP, bound to matrix or host cell re...

Roles played by the proximal-to-distal sequencing (PDS) of the multi-joint limb in a relatively slow target-aiming task by the arm were investigated using keystroke motion on the piano. Kinematic recordings were made while experts (N=7) and novices (N=7) of piano players performed an octave keystroke at four linearly-scaled loudness levels with a short tone production (staccato) technique. The ...

The sounds accompanying electrophonic burster meteors are characteristically described as being akin to short duration “pops” and staccato–like “clicks”. As a phenomenon distinct from the enduring electrophonic sounds that occasionally accompany the passage and ablation of large meteoroids in the Earth’s lower atmosphere, the bursters have proved stubbornly difficult to explain. A straightforwa...