Real science at its best!
A deeply interesting piece of research.

The human voice has complex acoustic qualities that are directly coupled to peripheral musculoskeletal tensioning of the body, such as subtle wrist movements. In this study, human vocalizers produced a steady-state vocalization while rhythmically moving the wrist or the arm at different tempos. Although listeners could only hear and not see the vocalizer, they were able to completely synchronize their own rhythmic wrist or arm movement with the movement of the vocalizer which they perceived in the voice acoustics.

The authors mention a couple of observations that triggered the research.

1. Blind people gesture normally while talking, even though they've never seen and imitated others.

2. Most people gesture while talking on the phone.

I've noticed both of these things, but didn't think of an internal connection.

The second observation was probably clearer and easier to test before widespread cellphones. On landlines, women would often hold the phone on their shoulder to leave both hands free for gesturing. Now that most phones are video, there's too much opportunity for imitation, so the variable is confounded.

Nobody has tried to test the receiving end of this phenomenon before. Kudos to the researchers for thinking of it, and then VERIFYING it.

Real science at its best.

Literally and precisely Carver.

Look about you.
Take hold of the things that are here.
Talk to them.
Let them talk to you.

= = = = =

On the acoustic end, the researchers found that F0 goes up and down slightly along with the elbow and wrist motion. I'll bet this isn't the 'first driver' of the synchronization, because we don't pay much attention to F0. On old landlines we didn't even hear F0 as such, and we didn't know it was missing. I'd bet on a change in pharyngeal resonance, which is more phonemic. Change in pharyngeal resonance forces the folds to change F0 slightly, so the F0 change would be secondary. Languages with pharyngeal phonemes like Arabic should have stronger listener sync than Euro languages.

Connecting this with writing would be difficult in Euro languages with arbitrary letters that halfway represent single phonemes. It might be easier (again) in Arabic, where the cursive forms typically flow together to form a word. The connection was explicitly examined in the early days of chordal writing and shorthand transcription, again similar to Arabic. In the 1880s when shorthand was new, teachers frequently discussed and experimented with forms that flowed naturally with speech gestures.

Braille, which is all in the wrist, is partly chordal. And Chappe's semaphore code, again all in the wrist, was strongly chordal.

But when you let the fingers do the talking, whether deaf fingerspelling or keyboard typing, the result is alphabetic and arbitrary.

Labels: Carver

  ¶ 5:18 AM