No abstract

Groove is a pleasant feeling that compels people to move their bodies along with music. In the past, there was some consensus among both musicians and researchers that the main factor in inducing this feeling is onset asynchrony of sounds. However, recent studies have asserted that no-asynchrony is the condition that will obtain the highest groove. The current study examined whether no-asynchrony exclusively elicits the highest groove. In Experiment 1, we measured the groove increment of a backbeat drum pattern as a function of the asynchronies between bass guitar and hi-hat cymbal sounds. Upon evaluation, the scores of no conditions exceeded those of the synchronous condition. However, the condition with slight bass guitar precedence over the hi-hat achieved an approximately equal score to the condition with complete synchrony, and that score was higher than the ones achieved with bass delay. In Experiment 2, we measured the participants’ sensitivities to timing discrimination. The results confirmed that the amount of bass precedence in Experiment 1 was perceptible to the listeners. These findings suggest that complete synchronization is not always the best condition to achieve groove and that listeners prefer perceivable asynchronies in some cases.

We investigated the effects of two prominent aromas, lavender and jasmine, on peripheral and cardiac autonomic nervous system activity under stressful conditions, in a highly reproducible manner using an olfactometer. The subjects comprised 17 healthy men aged 20-24 years. In this within-subjects study design, all subjects were required to perform a simple calculation task for 30 min to induce cognitive stress, and aroma from lavender or jasmine essential oil or a control stimulus was inhaled intermittently ( rst 20 s of each 1-min interval) to prevent olfactory fatigue. The control stimulus was provided by triethyl citrate, an odourless solvent. In addition to subjective psychological assessments using a visual analogue scale, the temperature at the tip of the nose and cardiac activity on electrocardiogram were recorded as indices of peripheral and cardiac autonomic nervous system activities, respectively. Signi cant decreases in nose tip temperature and high-frequency (HF) component of heart rate variability (HRV), and a signi cant increase in heart rate were observed under all three conditions. However, compared with the control condition, lavender inhalation induced signi cantly greater decreases in nose tip temperature (p < 0.01) and HF component of HRV (p < 0.01), which indicated greater enhancement of sympathetic nervous system activity and suppression of parasympathetic nervous system activity. On the other hand, lavender inhalation induced a positive mood, less subjective stress, and increased concentration during the task (p < 0.01). These contradictory results of enhanced physiological stress response and lower subjective stress induced by lavender inhalation under stressful conditions suggest that lavender aroma may have effects other than sedation. Further studies are necessary to further clarify these effects.

The coil for the superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) is optimized by use of the virial theorem with stored energy and stress. In this work, we show the theoretical limit of stored energy with the maximum stress. To achieve the ideal limit, we propose the toroidal coil with helical winding. It is a hybrid coil of a toroidal field (TF) coil and a solenoidal coil helically wound on a torus. The winding is modulated in such that the toroidal field is created in the torus whereas the poloidal field is only out of the tours. In this case, the electromagnetic force is represented by the difference in the poloidal and the toroidal magnetic pressure. The virial theorem in the magnet is the relation of the magnetic energy and the averaged stress, and shows that the best coil to store the magnetic energy under the weakest averaged stress requires equal averaged principal stresses in all directions, which determines the ratio of the poloidal and toroidal current of our toroidal coil. The coil increases the magnetic energy to 4 times the conventional TF coil with the same maximum stress.