How do you calculate the instantaneous frequency of a signal in LabView?

[eemans]

I'm working with neural signals that can be described as a nonlinear series of action potentials.  I've already calculated the spike density function (spikes per second against time) and was wondering if this is the instantaneous frequency?  If not, could someone please describe how to calculate instantaneous frequency in LabView without the advanced signal processing toolkit.

[johnsold]

Instantaneous frequency is a term which seems to be context-sensitive.  In other words the definition can vary depending upon the application.

Spikes per second would be more of an average frequency (averaged over one second).

For your neural signals I would think that an instantaneous frequency would be defined as the reciprocal of the time between successive spikes.  Since you can count spikes, you should be able to determine the time of each spike.

Lynn 

[Cory_K]

I would just like to elaborate on Lynn's correct idea.

You can use a function such as the Peak Detector.vi

This will output an array of each peaks (x,y) coordinates.

You can then calculate a 1/(delta-x) for each peak, which should serve as a freqency, as Lynn said.