Conversational Interactivity in Slow-motion: a Comparison of Phone Dialogues and Opera Scenes

Modeling the interactivity of conversations recently has gained increasing interest in the telecommunications community, especially with regard to the integration of multimedia applications over packet-based transmission technologies. A quantitative description of interactivity either relies on (subjective) user tests or on instrumental (objective) metrics which use appropriate signal parameters for deriving a scalar characterization of interactivity. Whereas traditional research in this area is based on examples of spontaneous conversations, our main focus is on “non-spontaneous conversations”, where structure and speakers’ actions are largely fixed a priori, e.g. by a movie script or a music score. As special examples, in this paper we investigate the characteristics of opera duets and larger ensemble scenes with respect to interactivity models like Parametric Conversation Analysis, Conversational Temperature or Conversational Entropy. After introducing the basic measurement framework and reviewing related experiments in the area of VoIP (Voice-over-IP), we present quantitative results for a series of representative opera excerpts. Having demonstrated the close relationship between these two types of conversations, we argue that opera scenes can formally be viewed as conversations in slow-motion. This may lead to important conclusions for telecommunication networks as well as for the design of interactive sound systems and the parametrization of algorithmic composition tools.