When musicians compose the harmony, they usually try various possible combinations of the music pitches stored in their memory, which can be considered as a optimization process of adjusting the input (pitches) to obtain the optimal output (perfect harmony). Harmony search draws the inspiration from harmony improvisation, and has gained considerable results in the field of optimization, althoug...

Sound patterns of vowel harmony reduce articulatory effort which facilitates speech production with increased speech rate and accuracy. We argue that back harmony patterns reduce articulatory effort compared to height harmony and non-harmony patterns and harmony patterns formed from front unrounded (FU) vowels reduce articulatory effort compared to those of front rounded (FR)vowels. We report o...

This chapter addresses harmony systems, a term which encompasses consonant harmony, vowel harmony, and vowel-consonant harmony. Harmony refers to phonological assimilation for harmonic feature(s) that may operate over a string of multiple segments. This can be construed in one of two ways. Two segments may interact “at a distance” across at least one (apparently) unaffected segment, as shown fo...

Colour harmony was investigated using direct visual observations of computer simulated displays and compared with predictions of different colour harmony theories. Ou and Luo [1] constructed a model of colour harmony (CH formula) based on a harmony pair comparison experiment. The present paper compares our results with harmony predictions of the CH formula, and of colour harmony models based on...

0. Introduction This study documents and analyzes opacity in the coronal harmony of Kinyarwanda. This harmony presents several features of interest. First, the existence of opacity in coronal harmony is rare: to the best of our knowledge it has only previously been reported in Sanskrit’s nasal retroflex harmony. In Kinyarwanda the harmony audibly affects only sibilants, and it is blocked by cor...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to conduct a psycho-social group intervention consisting of 3 parts, educate patients on methods to cope with stress and solve problems, hold group discussions and practice progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) for cancer patients, and investigate the way that group dynamics work in psycho-social group interventions in Japan. METHODS Three facilitators a...

This paper examines the views of Hong Kong community leaders on the underlying issues that affect family health, happiness and harmony (3Hs) in Hong Kong. Using a community reconnaissance method, a series of individual in-depth interviews with 26 leaders that represent neighbourhoods of diverse socio-economic status (SES) from June to August 2008 were conducted. Participants considered that cha...

The self-concept is one of the main organizing constructs in the behavioral sciences because it influences how people interpret their environment, the choices they make, whether and how they initiate action, and the pursuit of specific goals. Because belonging to social groups and feeling interconnected is critical to human survival, the authors propose that people spontaneously change their wo...

Harmony systems are often described in the linguistic literature in a highly schematic and somewhat idealized fashion. Further, instances of disharmony within harmony languages typically have been treated as exceptional or anomalous, rather than as a natural and expected part of the harmony system. In documenting several vowel harmony languages indigenous to Siberia, we found both highly patter...