Time in Music and Culture

From Aristotle to Heidegger, philosophers distinguished two orders of time, before, after and past, present, future, presenting them in a wide range of interpretations. It was only around the turn of the 1970s that two theories of time which deliberately went beyond that tradition, enhancing our notional apparatus, were produced independently of one another. The nature philosopher Julius T. Fraser, founder of the interdisciplinary International Society for the Study of Time, distinguished temporal levels in the evolution of the Cosmos and the structure of the human mind: atemporality,prototemporality,eotemporality,biotemporality andnootemporality. The author of the book distinguishes two ‘dimensions’ in time: the dimension of the sequence of time (syntagmatic) and the dimension of the sizes of duration or frequency (systemic). On the systemic scale, the author distinguishes, in human ways of existing and acting, a visual zone, zone of the psychological present, zone of works and performances, zone of the natural and cultural environment, zone of individual and social life and zone of history, myth and tradition. In this book, the author provides a synthesis of these theories

Spontaneous Voice Gender Imitation Abilities in Adult Speakers

Background The frequency components of the human voice play a major role in signalling the gender of the speaker. A voice imitation study was conducted to investigate individuals' ability to make behavioural adjustments to fundamental frequency (F0), and formants (Fi) in order to manipulate their expression of voice gender. Methodology/Principal Findings Thirty-two native British-English adult speakers were asked to read out loud different types of text (words, sentence, passage) using their normal voice and then while sounding as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as possible. Overall, the results show that both men and women raised their F0 and Fi when feminising their voice, and lowered their F0 and Fi when masculinising their voice. Conclusions/Significance These observations suggest that adult speakers are capable of spontaneous glottal and vocal tract length adjustments to express masculinity and femininity in their voice. These results point to a “gender code”, where speakers make a conventionalized use of the existing sex dimorphism to vary the expression of their gender and gender-related attributes

Fast Speech in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis

Moers-Prinz D. Fast Speech in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2020.Speech synthesis is part of the everyday life of many people with severe visual disabilities. For those who are reliant on assistive speech technology the possibility to choose a fast speaking rate is reported to be essential. But also expressive speech synthesis and other spoken language interfaces may require an integration of fast speech. Architectures like formant or diphone synthesis are able to produce synthetic speech at fast speech rates, but the generated speech does not sound very natural. Unit selection synthesis systems, however, are capable of delivering more natural output. Nevertheless, fast speech has not been adequately implemented into such systems to date. Thus, the goal of the work presented here was to determine an optimal strategy for modeling fast speech in unit selection speech synthesis to provide potential users with a more natural sounding alternative for fast speech output

Speech rhythm: the language-specific integration of pitch and duration

Experimental phonetic research on speech rhythm seems to have reached an impasse. Recently, this research field has tended to investigate produced (rather than perceived) rhythm, focussing on timing, i.e. duration as an acoustic cue, and has not considered that rhythm perception might be influenced by native language. Yet evidence from other areas of phonetics, and other disciplines, suggests that an investigation of rhythm is needed which (i) focuses on listeners’ perception, (ii) acknowledges the role of several acoustic cues, and (iii) explores whether the relative significance of these cues differs between languages. This thesis, the originality of which derives from its adoption of these three perspectives combined, indicates new directions for progress. A series of perceptual experiments investigated the interaction of duration and f0 as perceptual cues to prosody in languages with different prosodic structures – Swiss German, Swiss French, and French (i.e. from France). The first experiment demonstrated that a dynamic f0 increases perceived syllable duration in contextually isolated pairs of monosyllables, for all three language groups. The second experiment found that dynamic f0 and increased duration interact as cues to rhythmic groups in series of monosyllabic digits and letters; the two cues were significantly more effective than one when heard simultaneously, but significantly less effective than one when heard in conflicting positions around the rhythmic-group boundary location, and native language influenced whether f0 or duration was the more effective cue. These two experiments laid the basis for the third, which directly addressed rhythm. Listeners were asked to judge the rhythmicality of sentences with systematic duration and f0 manipulations; the results provide evidence that duration and f0 are interdependent cues in rhythm perception, and that the weighting of each cue varies in different languages. A fourth experiment applied the perceptual results to production data, to develop a rhythm metric which captures the multi-dimensional and language-specific nature of perceived rhythm in speech production. These findings have the important implication that if future phonetic research on rhythm follows these new perspectives, it may circumvent the impasse and advance our knowledge and model of speech rhythm.This work was funded by an AHRC doctoral award to the author

Eurolanguages-2011: Innovations and Development

Збірник наукових студентських робіт призначено для широкого кола читачів, які цікавляться проблемами вивчення іноземних мов та перекладу в Україн

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA) came into being in 1999 from the particularly felt need of sharing know-how, objectives and results between areas that until then seemed quite distinct such as bioengineering, medicine and singing. MAVEBA deals with all aspects concerning the study of the human voice with applications ranging from the neonate to the adult and elderly. Over the years the initial issues have grown and spread also in other aspects of research such as occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. MAVEBA takes place every two years always in Firenze, Italy. This edition celebrates twenty years of uninterrupted and succesfully research in the field of voice analysis

Multi-Platform Intelligent System for Multimodal Human-Computer Interaction

We present a flexible human--robot interaction architecture that incorporates emotions and moods to provide a natural experience for humans. To determine the emotional state of the user, information representing eye gaze and facial expression is combined with other contextual information such as whether the user is asking questions or has been quiet for some time. Subsequently, an appropriate robot behaviour is selected from a multi-path scenario. This architecture can be easily adapted to interactions with non-embodied robots such as avatars on a mobile device or a PC. We present the outcome of evaluating an implementation of our proposed architecture as a whole, and also of its modules for detecting emotions and questions. Results are promising and provide a basis for further development

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Chapter 5 Schnittke’s polystylistic schemata

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) was arguably the most important Russian composer since Shostakovich, and his music has generated a great deal of academic interest in the years since his death. Schnittke Studies provides a variety of perspectives on the composer and his music. The field is currently diverse and vibrant, and this book demonstrates the range of academic approaches being applied to Schnittke’s work and the insights they provide, covering: polystylism, for which Schnittke is best known, the significance of the composer’s Christian faith, and detailed formal analyses of key works, with connections drawn between the apparently divergent periods of the composer’s career. This book has been prepared as a memorial to Professor Alexander Ivashkin, a leading scholar in the field, who died in 2014, and will be of interest not only to those studying Schnittke's music, but also those with an interest in late Soviet-era music in general