Open symposium
February 11, 2010
at Speech, Music
and Hearing, KTH
Cumhur Erkut   The sound of many real and virtual hands clapping: A research outline


14:00  Roberto Bresin
14:05  Rolf Inge Godøy
14:30  Sofia Dahl
15:00 Coffee break
15:15  Nicola Bernardini
15:45  Cumhur Erkut
16:15 Coffee break
16:30  Christina Dravins
17:00  Tony Brooks

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Presentation slides in pdf

Hand clapping is a direct relation between sound and motion involving our bodily gestures. The capability of performing hand clapping develops early on in infancy, usually before walking, and its recognition is tightly bound to the development of rhythm perception. Arguably, these affordances make this little sonic gesture, produced by continuous, cyclic arm and hand motion with discrete sound support, ubiquitous in every culture. Societies assign culturally-shaped functions to hand clapping, ranging from individual rhythm accompaniment and appreciation to social expression. Especially the last function, in the form of synchronized applause, taps into our natural ability of quickly analyzing and anticipating the instantaneous tempo, coordinating our action based on sensorimotor synchronization, construct targets and goals, and negotiating the desired tempo in a social setting. Despite these activities are so common in our daily experiences, when we have decided to generate hand clapping sounds synthetically about five years ago, in the context of modeling synchronous or asynchronous applause, we have noticed that there were only a few studies we could rely upon, and they were scattered across disciplines. We have since aimed for developing analysis, modeling, and simulation tools that could adapt, test, and verify various findings of rhythmic entrainment in our problem. First and foremost, we have emphasized the importance of real-time auditory feedback, since sound is the primary sensory modality people rely on while coordinating their hand clapping action. Our research took another turn when we have enabled user interaction via real-time audio input in our system. We were surprised about the richness of scenarios in this closed loop of sonic interaction.

This talk will provide a summary of our research in hand clapping, in relation to sonic interaction design. Specifically, it will outline our synthesis, control, and event modeling strategies, introduce the hand-clapping recognition and rhythm estimation components we use, review various interaction scenarios we try to address, e.g., monitoring, goal setting with multiple constraints, and negotiation. It will conclude with sketches of a general framework for rhythmic interaction we are working on.


For questions contact Kjetil