Speakers, Singers and Stammerers

Animating Virtual Speakers or Singers from Audio: Lip-Synching Facial Animation

The aim of this special issue is to provide a detailed description of state-of-the-art systems for animating faces during speech, and identify new techniques that have recently emerged from both the audiovisual speech and computer graphics research communities. This special issue is a follow-up to the first LIPS Visual Speech Synthesis Challenge held as a special session at INTERSPEECH 2008 in ...

Singing Actors and Dancing Singers

By looking at two recent and widely recognized productions of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (by choreographer Sasha Waltz, Berlin 2005, and theatre-director Sebastian Nübling, Basel 2006) this article discusses three main aspects: 1. Genre: Coming from a Tanztheater (Waltz) and a Sprechtheater (Nübling) background, both directors renegotiate conventions of the operatic genre, and consciously ...

Silent music reading: auditory imagery and visuotonal modality transfer in singers and non-singers.

In daily life, responses are often facilitated by anticipatory imagery of expected targets which are announced by associated stimuli from different sensory modalities. Silent music reading represents an intriguing case of visuotonal modality transfer in working memory as it induces highly defined auditory imagery on the basis of presented visuospatial information (i.e. musical notes). Using fun...

Chest vibrations in singers

Are better singers smarter?

A simple restatement of the developmental stress hypothesis is that certain attributes of bird song are honest indicators of sig-naler quality because of their developmental costs. Spencer and