Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ‘flesh of the world’ speaks to an embodied connection to the spaces we inhabit deeply, primally, elementally. Flesh suggests water and its circulations, air and its respirations, earth and its conformations, fire and its inspirations. Flesh speaks to our bodily relations with the elements of a more-than-human world. This paper explores the felt imperative to these relations where, as Merleau-Ponty put it, ‘all distance is traversed’ and wherein movement arises not specifically in the body, but in the nexus (...) and intertwining of bodily engagement with the world. There is a primacy to movement that registers in the living body in its carnal ties to the elements of the world’s flesh. The ‘radical reflection’ on the ‘flesh of the world’ to which this analysis aspires in turn bears upon the general field of gestural reciprocities and connections, providing the insight that intimate gestures of the flesh, such as the embrace, are primordial attunements, motions of rhythm and reciprocity, that emanate from the world in identification with it. The embrace is fundamentally, elementally, a gesture of landscape dwelling. A phenomenology of elemental motions provides the textual reminder that to be at home in various landscapes means to know what it is to be embraced corporeally, sensually, within the human and especially the more-than-human folds of the world. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 1 May 2006. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper explores the use of Laban’s effort actions from the field of dance and drama as a means to document user responses to physical product interaction. A range of traditional and modern product pairs were identified and reviewed in two workshops, where participants were asked to discuss and complete worksheets on their emotional response. The results provide qualitative feedback on their reactions to the different movements, and form the beginnings of an ‘emotional vocabulary’ that we plan to use in (...) the development of semantic differentials for future studies. Key factors in emotional response to gesture have been identified, including aligning movement to product function, emotional conflicts in movement, and user readiness and framing a sequence of movements. Keywords: Design research; gesture; human factors; interface design. (shrink)

This paper explores the use of Laban’s effort actions from the field of dance and drama as a means to document user responses to physical product interaction. A range of traditional and modern product pairs were identified and reviewed in two workshops, where participants were asked to discuss and complete worksheets on their emotional response. The results provide qualitative feedback on their reactions to the different movements, and form the beginnings of an ‘emotional vocabulary’ that we plan to use in (...) the development of semantic differentials for future studies. Key factors in emotional response to gesture have been identified, including aligning movement to product function, emotional conflicts in movement, and user readiness and framing a sequence of movements. Keywords: Design research; gesture; human factors; interface design. (shrink)

This study aims to corroborate Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of fundamental ideas from Saussure’s linguistics by linking them to works that were independently elaborated by Jan Mukařovský, Czech structuralist aesthetician and literary theorist. I provide a comparative analysis of the two authors’ theories of language and their interpretations of thought as fundamentally determined by language. On this basis, I investigate how they conceive linguistic innovation and its translation into changes in the constituted language and other social codes and institutions. I explain (...) how they elaborate on Saussure’s idea of language as a system of oppositions by interpreting cultural innovation as a systematic variation of pre-established social norms and, similarly, linguistic innovation as gesturing within language. Connectedly, I show how Mukařovský’s works help clarify Merleau-Ponty’s focus on the gestural dimension of language. By discussing the two thinkers’ arguments in favour of linguistic innovation, I explore what could be called phenomenological limits of structuralism. (shrink)

In dynamic theories of presupposition, a trigger pp′ with presupposition p and at-issue component p′ comes with a requirement that p should be entailed by the local context of pp′. We argue that some co-speech gestures should be analyzed within a presuppositional framework, but with a twist: an expression p co-occurring with a co-speech gesture G with content g comes with the requirement that the local context of p should guarantee that p entails g; we call such assertion-dependent presuppositions (...) ‘cosuppositions’. We show that this analysis can be combined with earlier theories of local contexts to account for complex patterns of gesture projection in quantified and in attitudinal contexts, and we compare our account to two potential alternatives: one based on supervaluations, and one, due to Cornelia Ebert, that treats co-speech gestures as supplements. We argue that the latter is correct, but for ‘post-speech’ gestures, rather than for co-speech gestures. (shrink)

As a speculative and abstract discipline, philosophy is traditionally considered to be in dialectical tension with physical experience and daily practice. In contrast to this conventional and idealistic perspective, and in line with aesthetics as embodied knowledge, this article attempts to show that not only do we constantly think via gestures, movements, and physical experiences but also that there is no need to disconnect a concept from practice. Passing from Wittgenstein’s idea of “form of life” to the pragmatist aesthetics initiated (...) by Dewey’s idea of “art as experience,” I propose an analysis of the philosophical framework of postmodern dance (Yvonne Rainer) and of Happenings (Allan Kaprow), in order to underline the theoretical and conceptual research that is already at work in the field of contemporary art practice, the latter being understood as a sensorial dimension intrinsically linked to ordinary life. My general argument is that gestures, which are an inescapable and vital part of everyday life, can be foregrounded by certain artistic practices without corrupting or theatricalizing their ordinariness. (shrink)

Cet article interroge la question des corpus en analyse multimodale des corpus oraux d’interactions filmées dans le cadre d’une linguistique qui intègre l’étude des gestes à celle du discours pour rendre compte des pratiques langagières dans leur globalité. Ce type d’approche est traditionnellement associé à des petits corpus supports d’analyses qualitatives. À l’appui d’un tour d’horizon de recherches contemporaines en analyse multimodale des interactions orales, nous montrons que l’étude linguistique des gestes se prête à une grande variété d’approches innovantes au (...) plan méthodologique. En pratique, il reste à ce jour difficile de construire des grands corpus pour l’analyse gestuelle, parce qu’il s’agit d’une entreprise longue et coûteuse (enregistrement, transcription, annotation) : les petits corpus sont nombreux parce qu’ils sont plus faciles à construire pour un chercheur seul ou une petite équipe de recherche aux moyens limités. Cette situation tend cependant à évoluer, et ce de plusieurs manières, grâce aux collaborations nationales et internationales et aux nouveaux outils numériques. Les « petits » corpus n’en restent pas moins sources de résultats précieux en analyse gestuelle. Pour diverses raisons, les standards internationaux de l’évaluation de la recherche tendent à valoriser l’analyse quantitative aux dépens de l’analyse qualitative, faisant oublier que ces deux types d’approches ont des objectifs certes différents mais complémentaires : ils permettent de répondre à des questions de recherche différentes (étroites ou larges) et de proposer des savoirs d’origines différentes (généralisabilité des résultats ou généralisabilité des processus observés), dont la légitimité est elle aussi de nature différente (réfutabilité des résultats ou consilience des experts). Nombre de travaux récents en analyse gestuelle encouragent à remettre en question la dichotomie traditionnelle entre analyses qualitatives et quantitatives, en intégrant les deux approches de diverses manières. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Drawing on Arabic data sets, this study examines reported speech in naturally occurring conversations. Building on earlier work in discourse analysis, the study demonstrates how reported speech is a multiparty social field in which much of the reporting involves not only speech but also intricate forms of voice patterns and embodied reenactments. The study argues that speakers create an integrated complex of reporting, including multimodal utterances that go beyond the stream of speech to include relevant nonlinguistic sounds and embodied (...) gestures. Analysis also shows that participants engage in verbal and nonverbal forms of stance toward the reported activities. The speaker makes certain these stance displays are available to the addressees to achieve co-participation. In contrast to studies which restrict analysis to linguistic phenomena, this study approaches reported speech as a fine performance in which different kinds of semiotic resources are brought together. (shrink)

This article proposes an analysis of the gestural production of people suffering from fluent or non-fluent aphasia in comparison with the gestures performed by speakers not suffering from any language disorder. The interest of such a study is twofold: firstly, it allows a better understanding of what happens to gestures during the numerous speech dysfluencies caused by the speech impairment. Among other things, it sheds light on the links between speech and gestures in multimodal face-to-face interaction. Despite the profusion (...) of work on aphasia, very little is still known about the characteristics of the gestures performed spontaneously by aphasic people. The study presented here is based on video examples from the AphasiaBank corpus to illustrate the specific features of the speech and gestures of atypical speakers and gives a more detailed description of the gestural production of people with aphasia. This knowledge can inform post-stroke rehabilitation procedures that rely on some form of multimodal speech therapy in order to adapt to the various communication needs of the patients. (shrink)

This article brings a phenomenological perspective to the question of how bodily and inter-bodily experience is involved in interacting via audio-visual media like videoconferencing platforms. Contemporary discussions in interaction studies point to a certain suspension of bodily involvement in these mediated interactions, which leads to a visible loss of function in the case of gestures. Such observations have led phenomenologists to voice concern as to whether phenomenology is indeed still suited to account for the “digital world” in general. The following (...) article addresses these concerns by first making the case for a phenomenological understanding of gestures, which develops Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality by drawing from an intersubjective reading of Husserl’s threefold analysis of the body (aesthesiological, kinaesthetic and orientational). Subsequently, these reflections are used to describe the modifications, which occur when interacting “through” the screen in videoconferences, by showing that they are not just privative in nature. (shrink)

In debates about the proper analysis of demonstrative expressions, ostensive gestures and speaker intentions are often seen as competing for primary importance in securing reference. Underlying some of these debates is the mistaken assumption that ostensive gestures always make the demonstrated object maximally salient to interlocutors. When we abandon this assumption and focus on an object’s mutually-recognized salience itself, rather than on how the object came to be salient, we can work towards a more promising analysis with a (...) uniform treatment of demonstrative reference whether or not there is an ostensive gesture, and whether reference is ordinary or deferred. (shrink)

In this paper, we intend to discuss how, according to Peirce’s semiotics, gestures can be conceptualized and described as diagrams. We are not concerned with answering when, why or how gestures emerged as semiotic motor activities. As a prerequisite for the very formulation of these problems, we are rather interested in discussing the theoretical conditions which should be fulflled for gestures to be characterized as iconic processes - and more specifcally as diagrammatic processes. The frst step is to summarize a (...) systematic analysis of the variety of iconic signs, elaborated by Peirce, followed by his typology of hypoicons in order to describe the hypoiconic class of diagrams. After that, we present some tentative answers to the question of how to describe gestures as diagrammatic signs. (shrink)

In previous analyses of the influence of language on cognition, speech has been the main channel examined. In studies conducted among Yucatec Mayas, efforts to determine the preferred frame of reference in use in this community have failed to reach an agreement (Bohnemeyer & Stolz, 2006; Levinson, 2003 vs. Le Guen, 2006, 2009). This paper argues for a multimodal analysis of language that encompasses gesture as well as speech, and shows that the preferred frame of reference in Yucatec (...) Maya is only detectable through the analysis of co-speech gesture and not through speech alone. A series of experiments compares knowledge of the semantics of spatial terms, performance on nonlinguistic tasks and gestures produced by men and women. The results show a striking gender difference in the knowledge of the semantics of spatial terms, but an equal preference for a geocentric frame of reference in nonverbal tasks. In a localization task, participants used a variety of strategies in their speech, but they all exhibited a systematic preference for a geocentric frame of reference in their gestures. (shrink)

The last decades have seen major advances in the study of gestures both in humans and non-human primates. In this paper, we seriously examine the idea that there may be gestural form types that are shared across great ape species, including humans, which may underlie gestural universals, both in form and meaning. We focus on one case study, the hand fling gesture common to chimpanzees and humans, and provide a semantic analysis of this gesture.

Ever since Charles Goodwin’s seminal works on gaze, there has been a long-standing interest in Conversation Analysis in the interrelationship between talk and bodily conduct in the accomplishment of social action. Recently, a small but emerging body of research has explored the ways in which embodied conduct figures in the organization and operations of repair. In this article, I take up a similar theme and investigate the interaction between talk and iconic gestures in same-turn self-initiated repair in Mandarin conversation. (...) The phenomenon I examine concerns the use of what I call “gestural repair.” The analysis focuses on how such repair can intertwine with talk in multi-stage operations in the progressivity and resolution of repair. The data are drawn from 50 hours of naturally-occurring conversations collected in China. Some unique features of such gestural repair observed in the Mandarin data are also discussed. (shrink)

Based on archival research, this article analyses the pedagogical gestures in Derrida's (largely unpublished) lectures on hospitality (1995/96), with particular attention to the enactment of hospitality in these gestures. The motivation for this analysis is twofold. First, since the large-group university lecture has been widely critiqued as a pedagogical model, the article seeks to retrieve what may be of worth in the form of the lecture. Second, it is relevant to analyse the pedagogy of lectures that address the topic (...) of hospitality, as there would be a performative contradiction in teaching inhospitably about hospitality. (shrink)

This study examines the form and function of gestural depictions that develop over extended stretches of concept explanation by a philosopher. Building onStreeck’s (2009)explorations of depiction by gesture, we examine how this speaker’s process of exposition involves sequences of multimodal, analogical depiction by which the philosophical concepts are not only expressed through gesture forms, but also dynamically analyzed and construed through gestural activity. Drawing on perspectives of gesture as active meaning making (Müller 2014,2016,Streeck 2009), we argue that (...) the build-up of gestures in depiction sequences, activated through a multimodal metaphor (Müller & Cienki 2009), engages the wider philosophical standpoint of the speaker. Using video analysis supported by interview data, we demonstrate how examination of gestures within and across discourse can lead to understanding of how dynamic, embodied, and subjective processes of conceptualization contribute to philosophical theorizing. (shrink)

Gestures and speech are clearly synchronized in many ways. However, previous studies have shown that the semantic similarity between gestures and speech breaks down as people approach transitions in understanding. Explanations for these gesture–speech mismatches, which focus on gestures and speech expressing different cognitive strategies, have been criticized for disregarding gestures’ and speech's integration and synchronization. In the current study, we applied three different perspectives to investigate gesture–speech synchronization in an easy and a difficult task: temporal alignment, semantic (...) similarity, and complexity matching. Participants engaged in a simple cognitive task and were assigned to either an easy or a difficult condition. We automatically measured pointing gestures, and we coded participant's speech, to determine the temporal alignment and semantic similarity between gestures and speech. Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis was used to determine the extent of complexity matching between gestures and speech. We found that task difficulty indeed influenced gesture–speech synchronization in all three domains. We thereby extended the phenomenon of gesture–speech mismatches to difficult tasks in general. Furthermore, we investigated how temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching were related in each condition, and how they predicted participants’ task performance. Our study illustrates how combining multiple perspectives, originating from different research areas (i.e., coordination dynamics, complexity science, cognitive psychology), provides novel understanding about cognitive concepts in general and about gesture–speech synchronization and task difficulty in particular. (shrink)

A variety of semiotic resources makes the construction of scientific knowledge possible and meaning-making resources are conveyed by certain semiotic modes. Next, numerous studies have demonstrated the pedagogical importance of gestures in the demonstration of scientific knowledge in the classroom. Drawing on social semiotic systemic functional theory and legitimation code theory, this study explores the types and the role of gestures in the semiotic construction of scientific knowledge in pedagogic semiosis and their pedagogical values for the meaning-making of science content. (...) With this aim, a gesture observation protocol (GOP) is developed to annotate and analyze data. Two science lectures, which are broadcast remotely for middle school students including gifted students, are observed. Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) method is employed to analyze and evaluate data. Results demonstrated that the deployment of gestures that contributes to the construction of scientific knowledge is low and deployed gestures mostly do not have pedagogical value. It is recommended that teachers should be more conscious and educated about deploying gestures to present scientific knowledge efficiently. (shrink)

Human communication is by defaultpolysemiotic: it involves the spontaneous combination of two or moresemiotic systems, the most important ones beinglanguage,gesture, anddepiction. We formulate an original cognitive-semiotic framework for the analysis of polysemiosis, contrasting this with more familiar systems based on the ambiguous term “multimodality.” To be fully explicit, we developed a coding system for the analysis of polysemiotic utterances containing speech, gesture, and drawing, and implemented this in the ELAN video annotation software. We used this to (...) analyze 23 video-recordings of sand drawing performances on Paama, Vanuatu and 20 sand stories of the Pitjantjatjara culture in Central Australia. Methodologically we used theconceptual-empirical loopof cognitive semiotics: our theoretical framework guided general considerations, such as distinguishing between the “tiers” of gesture and depiction, and the three kinds of semiotic grounds (iconic, indexical, symbolic), but the precise decisions on how to operationalize these were made only after extensive work with the material. We describe the coding system in detail and provide illustrative examples from the Paamese and Pitjantjatjara data, remarking on both similarities and differences in the polysemiosis of the two cultural practices. We conclude by summarizing the contributions of the study and point to some directions for future research. (shrink)

One way speakers can refer to themselves in conversation is with a stressed first-person pronoun accompanied by a movement of the hand to or toward the chest. This can be produced alone or in tandem with a reference and gesture to another person. Close analysis of several instances of self-referential gesture demonstrates that this form of self-reference is designed to achieve interactional work beyond simple reference, specifically relational disaggregation and self-referential extraction.

We present a formal analysis of iconic coverbal gesture. Our model describes the incomplete meaning of gesture that’s derivable from its form, and the pragmatic reasoning that yields a more specific interpretation. Our formalism builds reported.

The objective to which this manuscript is oriented to is focused on the analysis of interpersonal communication in sport. The multimodal essence of human nature adopts special characteristics in individual and team sports, given the roles that athletes adopt in different circumstances, depending on the contingencies that characterize each competition or each training session. Themixed methodsframework allows us to advance in the ways of integration between qualitative and quantitative elements, taking advantage of the proven possibilities of systematic observation, which (...) we can considermixed methodin itself, and which provides rigor and flexibility in the study of the communicative flow in sport. In any sport, the procedure followed by systematic observation may require direct observation, which is characterized by its high perceptiveness, or indirect observation, when it comes to verbal behavior or documentary material. In all cases, the procedure is structured in three macro-stages: QUAL-QUAN-QUAL. In this work we start from a conceptual positioning about interpersonal communication, to later show the sequential gear in sports about obtaining qualitative data, its transformation into other types of data that are still qualitative but have been structured, analyze them quantitatively, and return to a qualitative stage where the interpretation of the results is possible. This process ofquantitizingconstitutes the cornerstone that gives shape and structure to any research on interpersonal communication in sport that combines the fine nuances of qualitative data (a motor action, a gesture, an exclamation,…) with the power of robust quantitative data analysis suitable for the treatment of organized qualitative data, which will provide qualitativefeed-back. (shrink)

In face-to-face interaction, speakers make multimodal contributions that exploit both the linguistic resources of spoken language and the visual and spatial affordances of gesture. In this paper, we argue that, in formulating and understanding such multimodal contributions, interlocutors apply the same principles of coherence that characterize the interpretation of natural language discourse. In particular, we use a close analysis of a series of naturally-occurring embodied discourses to argue for two key generalizations. First, communicators and their audiences draw on (...) coherence relations to establish interpretive connections between successive gestures and between gestures and speech. Second, coherence relations facilitate meaning-making by resolving the underspecified meaning of each communicative act through constrained inference over entities, propositions, and spatial frames made salient in the prior discourse. Our approach to gesture interpretation improves on previous work in better accounting for its flexibility, in capturing its constraints, and in laying the groundwork for formal and computational models. At the same time, it shows that gesture provides an important source of evidence to sharpen the theory of coherence relations and contextual resolution. (shrink)

Resumen Al momento de comparar dos obras disímiles en términos de lo que aquí llamaremos el gesto lingüístico, pero similares en cuanto a su comprensión fundamental del decir respecto de su función, se vuelve clara la necesidad de expandir la metódica de acceso a tal fenómeno e incluir el momento analítico clave del ánimo del lenguaje. El presente análisis tiene como meta lograr tal expansión, desde el punto de partida ontológico que se propone en Ser y tiempo, para llevarlo hasta (...) un puerto -en apariencia- tan disímil como es la obra literaria de Roberto Bolaño.When comparing two works, that are dissimilar in terms of what we will call here the linguistic gesture, but similar in terms of their fundamental understanding of the concept with respect to its function, the need to expand the access to such phenomena becomes clear, and to also include the key analytical moment of the mood of the language. The purpose of this analysis is to achieve expansion, from the proposed ontological starting point in Being and time, to take it to a port -apparently- as different as the literary work of Roberto Bolaño. (shrink)

Human motion gesture recognition is the most challenging research direction in the field of computer vision, and it is widely used in human-computer interaction, intelligent monitoring, virtual reality, human behaviour analysis, and other fields. This paper proposes a new type of deep convolutional generation confrontation network to recognize human motion pose. This method uses a deep convolutional stacked hourglass network to accurately extract the location of key joint points on the image. The generation and identification part of the (...) network is designed to encode the first hierarchy and the second hierarchy and show the spatial relationship of human body parts. The generator and the discriminator are designed as two parts in the network, and they are connected together in order to encode the possible relationship of appearance and, at the same time, the possibility of the existence of human body parts and the relationship between each part of the body and its parental part coding. In the image, the key nodes of the human body model and the general body posture can be identified more accurately. The method has been tested on different data sets. In most cases, the results obtained by the proposed method are better than those of other comparison methods. (shrink)

What is Levinas's relation to Hegel, the thinker who seems to summarize everything which Levinas's philosophy opposes, yet with whom Levinas never enters a sustained philosophical engagement? An answer can be found through an analysis of the concept of work, understood both as activity of labor and product thereof. The concept of work reveals that, despite the apparent (but superficial) sense of opposition, Levinas's philosophy works in a deliberately noncommittal, or, to use a Levinasian expression, ``dis-interested'' mode with respect (...) to Hegel. Such mode of disinterstedness expresses an ethical gesture of joyful hospitality that neither confirms nor refutes the German philosopher but rather opens him up to an eschatological dimension. (shrink)

When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co‐verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different kinds of spatial event descriptions, and how this relates to their cognitive abilities. Focusing on spontaneous illustrations of actions, we applied a semantic feature (SF) (...) class='Hi'>analysis to characterize combinations of speech and gesture meaning and related them to the child's visual‐spatial abilities or abstract/concrete reasoning abilities (measured using the standardized SON‐R test). Results show that children with higher cognitive abilities convey significantly more meaning via gesture and less solely via speech. These findings suggest that young children's use of cospeech representational gesturing is positively related to their mental representation and reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Focusing on a subject the author has extensively engaged with over the years, the article develops the notion of service as a cultural technique, and the media-theoretical figure of the servant as its servomechanism. The analysis follows three distinct scenarios that highlight, via different channels of perception, the interplay between corporeal practices and media objects in the production of specific cultural effects. In each of the examples chosen, service implies highly regulated networks of recursive operational chains that regulate in (...) their turn the production and distribution of power and knowledge. Thus, Krajewski argues, despite, or rather, precisely because of their apparent marginality and invisibility, the ‘small gestures’ of service join the ranks of already established, elementary symbolic techniques such as reading or writing. (shrink)

This paper describes our general framework for the investigation of how human gestures can be used to facilitate the interaction and communication between humans and robots. Two studies were carried out to reveal which “naturally occurring” gestures can be observed in a scenario where users had to explain to a robot how to perform a home task. Both studies followed a within-subjects design: participants had to demonstrate how to lay a table to a robot using two different methods — utilizing (...) only gestures or gestures and speech. The first study enabled the validation of the COGNIRON coding scheme for human gestures in Human–Robot Interaction. Based on the data collected in both studies, an annotated video corpus was produced and characteristics such as frequency and duration of the different gestural classes have been gathered to help capture requirements for the designers of HRI systems. The results from the first study regarding the frequencies of the gestural types suggest an interaction between the order of presentation of the two methods and the actual type of gestures produced. However, the analysis of the speech produced along with the gestures did not reveal differences due to ordering of the experimental conditions. The second study expands the issues addressed by the first study: we aimed at extending the role of the interaction partner by introducing some positive acknowledgement of the participants’ activity. The results show no significant differences in the distribution of gestures between the two explanation methods, in contrast to the previous study. Implications for HRI are discussed focusing on issues relevant for the design of the robot’s communication skills to support the interaction loop with humans in home scenarios. (shrink)

How do our embodied experiences of music shape our analysis, theorizing, and interpretation of musical texts, and our engagement with practices including composing, improvising, listening, and performing? 'Music, Analysis, and the Body: Experiments, Explorations, and Embodiments' is a pioneering essay collection uniting major and emerging scholars to consider how theory and analysis address music's literal and figurative bodies. The essayists offer critical overviews of different theoretical approaches to music analysis and embodiment, then test and demonstrate their (...) ideas in specific repertoires. The range of musics analysed is diverse: Western art music sits alongside non-Western repertoires, folk songs, jazz, sound art, audio-visual improvisations, soundtracks, sing-alongs, live events, popular songs, and the musical analysis of non-musical experiences. Topics examined include affect, agency, energetics, feel, gesture, metaphor, mimesis, rehearsal, subjectivity, and the objects of music analysis--as well as acoustic ecology, alterity, class, distraction, excess, political authority, sensoriality, technology, and transcendence. (shrink)

In an analysis of three college lectures, Corts and Pollio found that figurative language and gesture often appeared together in ‘bursts’. These bursts were initially characterized as novel figurative expression that centered on the primary topic of the lecture. The current study is an attempt to provide clearer description of how and why figurative language and gesture so often appear together in academic discourse. In addition, this study extends earlier findings to additional speakers and academic disciplines to (...) improve generalizability. In accordance with Corts and Pollio, the bursts of figurative activity are predominately novel rather than cliched, coherent with a root metaphor, and centered around the main topics of the lecture. The present study adds that figures within bursts largely include analogies and metaphor that represent a concept whereas topical figures outside of bursts are descriptive phrases that often include other types of figures such as hyperbole, litote, etc. The regularity of such bursts suggests that they serve an important cognitive function independent of personal style of the lecturer or any demands of a particular academic field. (shrink)

Human–robot interactions are often affected by error situations that are caused by either the robot or the human. Therefore, robots would profit from the ability to recognize when error situations occur. We investigated the verbal and non-verbal social signals that humans show when error situations occur in human–robot interaction experiments. For that, we analyzed 201 videos of five human–robot interaction user studies with varying tasks from four independent projects. The analysis shows that there are two types of error situations: (...) social norm violations and technical failures. Social norm violations are situations in which the robot does not adhere to the underlying social script of the interaction. Technical failures are caused by technical shortcomings of the robot. The results of the video analysis show that the study participants use many head movements and very few gestures, but they often smile, when in an error situation with the robot. The results suggest that participants do not see the robot as a social interaction partner with comparable communication skills. Our findings have implications for builders and evaluators of human–robot interaction systems. The builders need to consider including modules for recognition and classification of head movements to the robot input channels. The evaluators need to make sure that the presence of an experimenter does not skew the results of their user studies. (shrink)

Body movement is a primary nonverbal communication channel in humans. Coordinated social behaviors, such as dancing together, encourage multifarious rhythmic and interpersonally coupled movements from which observers can extract socially and contextually relevant information. The investigation of relations between visual social perception and kinematic motor coupling is important for social cognition. Perceived coupling of dyads spontaneously dancing to pop music has been shown to be highly driven by the degree of frontal orientation between dancers. The perceptual salience of other aspects, (...) including postural congruence, movement frequencies, time‐delayed relations, and horizontal mirroring remains, however, uncertain. In a motion capture study, 90 participant dyads moved freely to 16 musical excerpts from eight musical genres, while their movements were recorded using optical motion capture. A total from 128 recordings from 8 dyads maximally facing each other were selected to generate silent 8‐s animations. Three kinematic features describing simultaneous and sequential full body coupling were extracted from the dyads. In an online experiment, the animations were presented to 432 observers, who were asked to rate perceived similarity and interaction between dancers. We found dyadic kinematic coupling estimates to be higher than those obtained from surrogate estimates, providing evidence for a social dimension of entrainment in dance. Further, we observed links between perceived similarity and coupling of both slower simultaneous horizontal gestures and posture bounding volumes. Perceived interaction, on the other hand, was more related to coupling of faster simultaneous gestures and to sequential coupling. Also, dyads who were perceived as more coupled tended to mirror their pair's movements. (shrink)

Greek ancient and early modern geometry necessarily uses diagrams. Among other things, these enter geometrical analysis. The paper distinguishes two sorts of geometrical analysis and shows that in one of them, dubbed “intra-confgurational” analysis, some diagrams necessarily enter as outcomes of a purely material gesture, namely not as result of a codifed constructive procedure, but as result of a free-hand drawing.

Abstract:Through dismantling the territorial integrity of the modern nation-state, Indigenous sovereignty threatens state imposed hegemonic systems. While these systems exist at the threshold spatially—borders and boundaries—they are the ideological epicenter for controlling human and non-human life, rendering them manageable by the state. These borders are also perpetually liminal spaces, and it is in this liminality that artists intervene through poetics, confronting state rhetorics and exercising sovereignty to address colonial wounds. In 2015 and 2017, two land-based ephemeral art projects were created (...) to challenge the terms by which territory is instrumentalized in order to justify the commodification of both land and humans. In 2015, the artist collective, Post-commodity, set up a land-based art installation, Repellent Fence, intersecting the US/Mexico border in an effort to “stitch” the Americas together again. The gesture of stitching is also employed in Maureen Gruben's Stitching My Landscape from 2017 in which Gruben stitched a segment of ocean ice with vibrant red broad cloth near her home in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories alongside the Ibyuk Pingo, a national landmark administered by Parks Canada. Both of these projects provide entry points into the various methods by which land is abstracted into an oppressive and singular form. They push back against the rigidity of prescribed borders, instead investigating more fluid entanglements with land.This paper provides a comparative analysis of these projects, examining the ways in which counterpoints are central to them as artistic interventions. Crossing diagonally to the borders that the nation-state has institutionalized produces a moment of reprise to a highly specific end: to heal. Pivotal to these anti-colonial critiques are rejection, dismissal and a refusal to translate. A symbolic reorientation of the ways humans interact with land arises, evoked through a performative gesture of stitching across fragmentations and divides. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to apply deep learning to music perception education. Music perception therapy for autistic children using gesture interactive robots based on the concept of educational psychology and deep learning technology is proposed. First, the experimental problems are defined and explained based on the relevant theories of pedagogy. Next, gesture interactive robots and music perception education classrooms are studied based on recurrent neural networks. Then, autistic children are treated by music perception, and an electroencephalogram (...) is used to collect the music perception effect and disease diagnosis results of children. Due to significant advantages of signal feature extraction and classification, RNN is used to analyze the EEG of autistic children receiving different music perception treatments to improve classification accuracy. The experimental results are as follows. The analysis of EEG signals proves that different people have different perceptions of music, but this difference fluctuates in a certain range. The classification accuracy of the designed model is about 72–94%, and the average classification accuracy is about 85%. The average accuracy of the model for EEG classification of autistic children is 85%, and that of healthy children is 84%. The test results with similar models also prove the excellent performance of the design model. This exploration provides a reference for applying the artificial intelligence technology in music perception education to diagnose and treat autistic children. (shrink)