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Project

Interactive vocal rhythms (FWOAL961)

How do two or more individuals coordinate their vocal communication in time? Interactive vocal rhythms are key in many aspects of our life: language, music, dance, religion, etc. To understand them, several unrelated fields have studied what is shared among languages, with non-human species, or computer-simulated interactive behavior. Mysteriously, these precise rhythms are partly absent in other apes, our closest relatives, but present in a few selected mammals: Studying interactive vocal rhythms in these mammals is key to understand how we got speech and music. This multidisciplinary project will address 3 questions about human interactive vocal rhythms: What is their fine-grained structure and how do they differ from non-vocal or non-interactive rhythms? How unique are they to our species, both behaviorally and neurally? Can we ‘teach’ computers how to separate individual contributions from multiple speakers, and, conversely, what are the minimal computational requirements to produce interactive rhythms? We will tackle these questions by studying interactive rhythms 1) not only in human speech, but also in 2) human music, 3) seal vocalizations, and 4) computer simulations. Approaches from zoology, linguistics, informatics, music cognition, acoustics, and neuroscience will pin down the unique features of interactive vocal rhythms in our species, and test hypotheses on their evolutionary origins: The reasons why we are chatty, rhythmic animals will become less of a mystery.
Date:1 Jan 2020 →  31 Dec 2023
Keywords:rythm cognistion, animal chorusing, evolution of music and speech
Disciplines:Audio and speech processing, Behavioural biology, Cognitive neuroscience