{
  "abstract": "Among the human senses, hearing is distinguished by its high frequency resolution and sensitivity to spatiotemporal patterns. Accordingly, sonification--the rendering of neural activity as sound for direct perception--has a long history in neuroscience. Although sonification can facilitate exploration of the temporal structure of population activity, dense spike trains are often difficult to track by ear. Here, I present HERO (Hierarchy-guided Event-faithful Reproducible Orchestration), a pipeline that assigns stable musical voices to recorded units while preserving spike onsets in a MIDI event representation. Each spike within a selected interval produces a single Note On message whose timing is determined by a global temporal dilation followed by bounded clock rounding. A separate analysis pathway uses multiscale correlations and block-bootstrap co-association to organize units into a hierarchy. This hierarchy guides instrument assignment, whereas each unit is assigned a fixed key, tuning offset, velocity, and stereo position. A derived SoundFont stores tuning and pan parameters independently for units that share a MIDI channel. Rate-dependent velocity and channel-volume settings are intended to reduce the dominance of frequently firing units. An online audio example illustrating the audibility of individual activity during large-scale firing is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOYGXcp727A. HERO provides a reproducible auditory representation of population activity that may help direct attention toward features warranting subsequent quantitative analysis.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "The University of Tokyo"
  ],
  "article_type": "New results",
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "affs": [
        0
      ],
      "name": "Y. Ikegaya"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/daxc734yjr0gb.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.64898/2026.09.05.749637",
  "fulltext_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.05.749637v1.full",
  "id": "daxc734yjr0gb",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.05.749637v1",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY",
  "licence_label": "CC BY",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "biorxiv",
      "neuroscience"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2805|Neural dynamics and brain function"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7212027828",
  "pdf_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.05.749637v1.full.pdf",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-05",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/daxc734yjr0gb.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:20:39Z",
      "native_id": "10.64898/2026.09.05.749637",
      "source": "biorxiv",
      "url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.05.749637v1"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "biorxiv:neuroscience",
      "subfield": "neuroscience"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Hearing hippocampal ripples: Event-faithful, reproducible sonification of multineuronal spiking with hierarchy-guided orchestration",
  "title_text": "Hearing hippocampal ripples: Event-faithful, reproducible sonification of multineuronal spiking with hierarchy-guided orchestration",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:20:39Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/daxc734yjr0gb",
  "venue": "bioRxiv",
  "versions": []
}