Opening Gesture Research Articles

Nasal coarticulation in Bininj Kunwok: An aerodynamic analysis

Bininj Kunwok (BKw), a language spoken in Northern Australia, restricts the degree of anticipatory nasalization, as suggested by previous aerodynamic and acoustic analyses (Butcher 1999). The current study uses aerodynamic measurements of speech to investigate patterns of nasalization and nasal articulation in Bininj Kunwok to compare with Australian languages more generally. The role of nasal coarticulation in ensuring language compre-hensibility a key question in phonetics research today is explored. Nasal aerodynamics is measured in intervocalic, word-medial nasals in the speech of five female speakers of BKw and data are analyzed using Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance (SSANOVA) and Functional Data Analysis averaging techniques. Results show that in a VNV sequence there is very little anticipatory vowel nasalization with no restriction on carryover nasalization for a following vowel. The maximum peak nasal flow is delayed until the oral release of a nasal for coronal articulations, indicating a delayed velum opening gesture. Patterns of anticipatory nasalization appears similar to nasal airflow in French non-nasalized vowels in oral vowel plus nasal environments (Delvaux et al. 2008). Findings show that Bininj Kunwok speakers use language specific strategies in order to limit anticipatory nasalization, enhancing place of articulation cues at a site of intonational prominence which also is also the location of the majority of place of articulation contrasts within the language. Patterns of airflow suggest enhancement and coarticulatory resistance in prosodically prominent VN and VNC sequences which we interpret as evidence of speakers maintaining a phonological contrast to enhance place of articulation cues.

Proposal of Digital Teaching Materials System by Gesture Operation Using a Three-dimension Depth Sensor

Proposal of Digital Teaching Materials System by Gesture Operation Using a Three-dimension Depth Sensor

Beginnings for Beginners: A Pedagogy for Starting a Prelude

This article presents a method for guiding students in the beginning phase of prelude composition, advancing them to the point where the opening gesture is complete and the rest of the prelude can proceed by maintaining the momentum already acquired. This teaching strategy focuses on the notion of what I term the quadruple gambit, a type of opening gesture often employed by Bach. Each gambit (opening move) is quadruple in its evenly timed presentation of four harmonic stages—stable, unstable, unstable, stable—forming either an underlying harmonic circuit of I–IV(or II)–V(or VII)–I or a harmonic shuttle of I–V(or VII)–V(or VII)–I. The harmonic categories of the circuit and shuttle combine with bass-line categories of pedal, clausula, and cadence to create idiomatic gambits for students to deploy in their compositions. In the first half of this article, I define the characteristics of this type of beginning and give multiple examples. In the second half, I demonstrate how instructors can help students emulate these gestures.

Design and Evaluation of Sound for Gesture Operation

Design and Evaluation of Sound for Gesture Operation

Testing the usability of smartphone surface gestures on different sizes of smartphones by different age groups of users

This study focuses on testing the usability of 3 different sizes of smartphones by children, adults, and the elderly. Forty-seven participants from each age group were recruited. The research consisted of two stages of experiments. In the first experiment, three existing gestures used by the Android system were evaluated: drag, pinch, and double-touch drag. In the second experiment, two additional re-design gestures were tested: multi-long press and slide down. The users' performances were measured based on their overall time, success time, accuracy, Fitts' Law values, and a subjective questionnaire. Among the five gestures, drag and multi-long press were categorized as the drag gesture, and pinch, double-touch drag and slide down were categorized as the enlarging gesture. The results show that children and adults outperformed the elderly in gesture operation. With respect to smartphone size, the subjects had faster response times and better Fitts' Law values on 6-inch phones. When comparing the subjective preference and the objective use measurement values of the two drag gestures and three enlarging gestures among the different age groups, it was found that children and adults were consistent, whereas the elderly were inconsistent. Overall, in operating the original drag and pinch gestures, the elderly exhibited better objective use measurements, but they preferred the improved gestures, such as slide down.

G4-1 A Study of Multi-touch Screen Installation in Vehicles for Single-touch and Gestural Operations

Touchscreens have been used for human-machine interactions in vehicle for years; researchers paid more attention to using touchscreen displays when driving was the primary task and the driving performance was the main concern. However, it is not legal to operate touchscreen devices while driving in most of modern countries. On the other hand, a driver may occasionally control in-vehicle systems through touch or even gestural operations on the touch display. The situation is becoming more and more popular and worthwhile further study. The current study investigated three different installations of a multi-touch screen in vehicle at high (around the driver's eye height in sitting), middle (around the height of the driver's shoulder) and low (around the height of the driver's waist) positions. Twenty-seven voluntary participants (aged 23.93±0.68 years old) were recruited to perform single-touch and gestural operations in a simulated car cabin. Their performance in accuracy for the two experimental tasks and subjective responses regarding difficulty, fatigue and preferences of the task and interfaces were recorded. The results of the study showed that, regardless of the single-touch target clicking task or the multitouch target fitting task, the averaged errors over all target positions were the least for the middle installation and were the highest for the low installation. When user performance for different target sizes was compared in the gestural operations, participants tended to deviate more when the target size was small (100-pixel diameter) but manipulated the size more accurately when it was big (200-pixel diameter). The subjective evaluation through questionnaires showed that participants preferred the middle installation. The high installation was considered more difficult and caused greater fatigue on right neck, shoulder, upper extremities, wrist, and thumb belly areas. Based on the results of the current study, the middle installation is recommended for its higher accuracy and less fatigue. The upper installation, despite being recommended by other literature, caused greater errors, higher difficulty and fatigue, resulting the least preference. The difficulty and fatigue was not revealed for the lower installation, but it caused lower accuracy in gestural operations. This study could contribute to future design of in-vehicle touch interfaces in that the accuracy of single-touch and multi-touch tasks may be improved by installing the touchscreen at a middle height (around shoulder level). Future studies may consider verifying experiments in an interface simulating real in-vehicle information systems and increasing the number of data collected so that the result can be more applicable in reality.

Development of Immersive Learning Equipment Using HMD and 3D Gesture Operation for Astronomy Education

Development of Immersive Learning Equipment Using HMD and 3D Gesture Operation for Astronomy Education

The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds

The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds

Wagner discourse of contemporary philosophy: Alain Badiou vs Philip Lacou-Labarthe

The article focuses on reconstructing the structures of implicit criticism on postmodern understanding of music, found within the discourse of a dispute between Alain Badiou and Philip Lacou-Labar the concerning philosophical interpretation of Richard Wagner's musical works. It was revealed that A. Badiou proposes a program to overcome the characteristic deconstructivist reduction of art to politics that brings the former to another by-product of ideology. Negative conceptual apparatus of deconstruction is opposed by A. Badiou with a hermeneutics, characterized by affirmative morphology and syntax constituted onto the pragmatics of a lesson, teaching action, open gesture of involvement. Badiou si an approach marks a good possibility of overcoming the methodological and ideological deadlock of postmodernity. This new wave of philosophical debates around Richard Wagner responds to the revival of grand epical genres in mass culture. Consequently a new dialectical thinking must be taught in order to continue the tradition of critical approach to culture. This is the key implication of A. Badiou's lessons on how it is possible to rethink the works of art and historically determined approaches to understanding them besides the clich?s of the recent postmodernist legacy. Although Badiou's critique itself can be seen as a kind of postmodernist interpreting technique, the French philosopher manages to escape the overt radicalism of postmodernist claims against Wagner by means of true radicalityof affirmative interpretation inspired not by suspicion of a concealed truth but rather a commitment to a truth to come.

Complementary Hand Responses Occur in Both Peri- and Extrapersonal Space.

Human beings have a strong tendency to imitate. Evidence from motor priming paradigms suggests that people automatically tend to imitate observed actions such as hand gestures by performing mirror-congruent movements (e.g., lifting one’s right finger upon observing a left finger movement; from a mirror perspective). Many observed actions however, do not require mirror-congruent responses but afford complementary (fitting) responses instead (e.g., handing over a cup; shaking hands). Crucially, whereas mirror-congruent responses don't require physical interaction with another person, complementary actions often do. Given that most experiments studying motor priming have used stimuli devoid of contextual information, this space or interaction-dependency of complementary responses has not yet been assessed. To address this issue, we let participants perform a task in which they had to mirror or complement a hand gesture (fist or open hand) performed by an actor depicted either within or outside of reach. In three studies, we observed faster reaction times and less response errors for complementary relative to mirrored hand movements in response to open hand gestures (i.e., ‘hand-shaking’) irrespective of the perceived interpersonal distance of the actor. This complementary effect could not be accounted for by a low-level spatial cueing effect. These results demonstrate that humans have a strong and automatic tendency to respond by performing complementary actions. In addition, our findings underline the limitations of manipulations of space in modulating effects of motor priming and the perception of affordances.

Articulatory reflexes of the three-way contrast in labial stops and kinematic evidence for domain-initial strengthening in Korean

This study examines articulatory characteristics of the three-way contrast in labial stops /p php*/ (lenis, aspirated, fortis, respectively) in Korean in phrase-initial and phrase-medial prosodic positions with a two-fold goal. First, it investigates supralaryngeal articulatory reflexes of the stops and explores articulatory invariance of these stops across prosodic positions. Second, it investigates Korean stops in kinematic terms from the perspective of domain-initial strengthening, and explores the nature of prosodically-conditioned speech production from a dynamical perspective. Results showed that the articulatory reflex of the three-way contrast was invariantly observed across prosodic positions with lip constriction degree (/p/</ph/</p*/), while lip constriction duration showed a binary distinction (/p/</php*/). Kinematically, there was only very weak articulatory evidence for the contrast across prosodic positions: The V-to-C lip closing movement tended to be faster for /ph/ than for /p/, and the C-to-V lip opening movement tended to be larger for /php*/ than for /p/. As for domain-initial strengthening, the consonantal lip closing gesture was characterized by a larger, longer and slower articulation, whereas the vocalic lip opening gesture (after the release) was larger and faster, but not longer. Kinematic relations indicated that the lip closing movement is most likely controlled by a rate of the clock (possibly modulated by a temporal modulation gesture, or π-gesture) comparable to boundary effects in English, but the boundary-induced lip opening movement was better accounted for by a change in target (possibly modulated by a spatial modulation gesture, or μ-gesture) which was comparable to prominence rather than boundary effects in English. The cross-linguistic difference was interpreted as coming from different prosodic systems between Korean and English, presumably instantiated in dynamical terms of how the temporal and the spatial modulation gestures are phased with constriction gestures in relation to boundary marking versus prominence marking.

Opening and Closing Jaw Movements of Young Children who Stutter

Objective: In this longitudinal study, we investigated the hypothesis that kinematic measures of jaw movement produced by children who stuttered (CWS) and children who did not stutter (CWNS) would differ between opening and closing speech gestures, across phonetic contexts, and across development. Methods: Mean amplitude, velocity, and duration of jaw opening and closing gestures during repeated productions of bilabial syllables were analyzed longitudinally at 1-year intervals for 13 CWS and 7 children CWNS. The utterances ranged across four phonetic contexts: single-syllable, two-syllable, three-syllable, and six-syllable. For jaw movement transduction, a strain gauge was attached to a football helmet in a novel design to minimize head movement. All kinematic measures were made from jaw movement tracings in Windaq (Dataq Instruments, Inc.) software, based on a standard millimeter to voltage conversion. Results: The main finding of the study was that opening gestures were produced by both CWS and CWNS with greater amplitude and duration compared to closing gestures. However, the kinematics associated with opening and closing jaw movements did not differ between CWS and CWNS, suggesting that the intrinsic articulatory dynamics of the two groups were similar. In addition, adapting the kinematics of opening and closing jaw movements across the four phonetic contexts did not differ between the groups for either movement amplitude or velocity. However, CWS produced the closing gesture with significantly greater duration compared to multi-syllable conditions, relative to CWNS. Finally, CWS and CWNS exhibited different longitudinal patterns for jaw amplitude and peak velocity. Conclusion: The speech motor systems of CWS and CWNS exhibited broadly similar organization of intrinsic articulatory dynamics, but groups may differ in how underlying dynamics are adapted to changing phonetic contexts across development. It is possible that the speech fluency of CWS might benefit from greater articulatory constraints, as the main between-group difference was identified when degrees of freedom of movement were greatest. Implications of findings are discussed within the development of a hierarchically organized speech motor system.

West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands by Emily Lutenski

Reviewed by: West of Harlem: African American Writers and the Borderlands by Emily Lutenski Michael Nieto Garcia WEST OF HARLEM: African American Writers and the Borderlands. By Emily Lutenski. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2015. In West of Harlem, Emily Lutenski brings heretofore marginalized or erased black modernist experiences to the center. As the book’s subtitle suggests, there is an intimate connection between African American Writers and the Borderlands. Though the nearly exclusive focus on Harlem as the site of black modernist literary production and identity formation provides a useful center point from which to start, the center cannot hold if striving to do justice to the breadth and complexity of black lives. Indeed, any dominant narrative of blackness—in any era—will likewise occlude, suppress, and deny the great diversity of African American experience. In her rejection of “the idea that the West is anomalous in black history and experience” Lutenski joins the growing ranks of scholars [End Page 173] who would disrupt, challenge, and outright refuse monolithic racial and cultural narratives (25). Rather than anomalous, Lutenski argues, the West played a significant role in shaping the consciousness of the New Negro. What is more, “the borderlands West … was repurposed as … dreamscape in the years of the New Negro renaissance” (257). The dream was shared by Ralph Ellison, who argued that black freedom can be found in the American West (5–10). Here the West figures as frontier, as an escape from the black-white dialectic, and as liberating geographic space “beyond the North-South binary” of the black diaspora (12). In this West, the African American dream and the American Dream converge, rather than deferring the latter for the advantage of the former. To figure black freedom through geographic mobility, however, introduces a new challenge, and a not unproblematic one at that: “if American culture is to be maintained, new frontiers must be created” (9). Lutenski’s argument, it should be noted, is a cultural one. The book’s thesis, to paraphrase its promotional copy, is that borderlands cultures influenced the art of key figures of the Harlem Renaissance in surprising and important ways. In short, one would be mistaken to conceive of African American identity as a monoculture rather than a diverse culture characterized by cultural mestizaje. By recovering the ways in which “Mexico played a formative role in [Langston] Hughes’s transnational and antiracist vision” we can better see that “a politics and aesthetics long considered Pan-African” must also “be understood as multiethnic” (27). The same could be said of the politics and aesthetics of Richard Wright (who was also deeply influenced by sojourns in Mexico), as well as Jean Toomer (who arrived in Harlem from the West, and kept a home in New Mexico), Arna Bontempts (who set multiple works in Los Angeles, where he “spent his formative years”), and other major figures of the Harlem Renaissance—the last three of whom Lutenski devotes separate chapters to in the book (26). Lutenski’s masterful recovery of the West’s influence on the African American imaginary—the myths, metaphors, and folklore around which identities coalesce and form—gestures toward the work of Paul Gilroy, whose seminal notion of the Black Atlantic encouraged looking beyond national borders. In illuminating previously occluded cultural and intellectual influences, such projects run parallel to work done in borderland studies, as José David Saldívar notes in Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. In drawing from both Gilroy and Saldívar, Lutenski’s recovery project suggests the need—given the inextricable connections that bind them together—for greater engagement and conversation between ethnic studies fields. As a spatial studies project situated in the borderlands of the American West, Lutenski’s work engages deeply with the work of Latina scholars such as Mary Pat Brady and Norma Alarcón. It is no surprise, then, that in opposition to her opening gesture toward Gilroy and “constructs of the transnational,” Lutenski must insist that “region” cannot be elided—that place matters (12). Even a more abstract and metaphorical account of space theory must insist on the importance of place, as indicated by Mary Pat Brady’s emphasis on “the discursive and the spatial...

Effects of varied conductor prep movements on singer muscle engagement and voicing behaviors

The purpose of this study was to examine whether certain nonverbal conductor gestures might trigger varied motor behaviors in choristers as indicated by acoustical data and measurement of extrinsic laryngeal muscle activity. Participants ( N = 23) performed a melody while following a prerecorded conductor who displayed the following fully-crossed preparatory gesture conditions: (a) initial upward or downward moving arm, (b) upward moving or neutral head positioning, and (c) fisted hand or open palm. Surface electrodes measured singer posterior neck, upper trapezius, suprahyoid, and sternocleidomastoid muscle region activity during inhalation. Audio recordings provided data for acoustic and perceptual comparisons. Among primary results: (a) suprahyoid mean muscle region activity was significantly greater during upward compared to downward moving gestures; (b) sternocleidomastoid mean muscle region activity was significantly higher during fisted compared to palm open gestures; (c) posterior neck and upper trapezius mean muscle region activity displayed no significant differences during the varied conditions; (d) fisted conditions corresponded to higher mean sung amplitudes than palm open conditions; and (e) expert listeners perceived that singer inhalation was less efficient during upward compared to downward moving gestures. Results were discussed in terms of chorister responses to conductor behaviors, implications for teacher-conductor preparation, and limitations of the study.

Derrida and narrative: telling stories, saving memories

It is well known that Derrida begins the lecture ‘Mnemosyne’, given some thirty years ago as the first of a series dedicated to the memory of his friend and sometime Yale colleague Paul de Man, with the autobiographical disclosure: ‘I have never known how to tell a story’ (MPD, 3). As he repeats the declaration a few pages later, it becomes clear that this singular revelation shares the uncertain exemplarity characteristic of autobiographical utterances. It is an incapacity that threatens to strike all those who would seek to preserve a memory in narrative: ‘who can really tell a story? Is narrative possible? Who can claim to know what a narrative entails? Or, before that, the memory it lays claim to?’ (MPD, 10) Moreover, in his opening gesture in this lecture, Derrida has already suggested that fidelity to memory may necessarily, rather than coincidentally, entail a lapse in storytelling, asking ‘what happens when the lover of Mnemosyne has not received the gift of narration? When he doesn’t know how to tell a story? When it is precisely because he keeps the memory that he loses the narrative?’ (MPD, 3). But some sort of drive to tell stories nonetheless leads Derrida to punctuate these lectures with anecdotes, for all his proclaimed deficiency in that regard and the more general reservations signalled about the adequacy of narrative in respect of safeguarding memory. He returns to the question of his defective storytelling in the Dick and Kofman film Derrida, in the context of the idea of telling the story of a philosopher’s life. Once again, the acknowledged narrative deficiency is accompanied by a kind of fascination: ‘the question for me is the question of narration, which has always been a serious question for me. I’ve always said I can’t tell a story. I’d love to tell stories, but

The effect of focus marking on supralaryngeal articulation – Is it mediated by accentuation?

In this study we explore the effects of focus-background structure on accentuation (i.e. whether a word bears a pitch accent or not) and supralaryngeal articulation, measured in terms of acoustic durations (syllable and foot durations) and lip kinematics (parameters relating to the opening gesture: duration, displacement, peak velocity and stiffness). Although words in focus were accented and those out of focus were not, there were few supralaryngeal differences between accented words when they were produced in the broad focus context and unaccented target words (out of focus). Thus, accentuation per se did not appear to lead to supralaryngeal modifications. However, there was a clear distinction between the supralaryngeal articulation of words in broad focus and those in contrastive focus. We conclude that supralaryngeal articulation – in terms of acoustic duration and lip kinematics – is related directly to the expression of focus structure and contrastivity, and is not, contrary to conclusions drawn in previous studies, mediated by the presence or absence of accent.

Utilization of Real-World Data for a Kinect-Based Paint System

This study provides two utilization methods of real-world data using a Kinect-based paint system. Recently, Kinect has been widely used for gesture operation. Although Kinect can detect multiple data simultaneously, most of conventional Kinect-based systems have not effectively used these data. Therefore, we propose two utilization methods: (1) a pen color adopts real-world color data captured from a Kinect; (2) two operation buttons track two sides of a user's hip. Our evaluation experiment has shown that two proposed methods are useful for the Kinect-based paint system.

Many Faces of Migrations

Many Faces of Migrations

Many Faces of Migrations

Many Faces of Migrations

Collaborative Interaction for Videos on Mobile Devices Based on Sketch Gestures

With the rapid progress of the network and mobile techniques, mobile devices such as mobile phones and portable devices, have become one of the most important parts in common life. Efficient techniques for watching, navigating and sharing videos on mobile devices collaboratively are appealing in mobile environment. In this paper, we propose a novel approach supporting efficiently collaborative operations on videos with sketch gestures. Furthermore, effective collaborative annotation and navigation operations are given to interact with videos on mobile devices for facilitating users’ communication based on mobile devices’ characteristics. Gesture operation and collaborative interaction architecture are given and improved during the interactive process. Finally, a user study is conducted showing that the effectivity and collaborative accessibility of video exploration is improved.