Harmony issues are widespread in human society and nature. To analyze these issues, harmony theory has been proposed as the main theoretical approach for the study of interpersonal relationships and relationships between humans and nature. Therefore, it is of great importance to study harmony theory. After briefly introducing the basic concepts of harmony theory, this paper expounds the five el...

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...

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...

The present study examines two methods for learning and modeling vowel harmony from text corpora. The first uses Expectation Maximization with Hidden Markov Models to find the most probable HMM for a training corpus. The second uses pointwise Mutual Information between distant vowels in a Boltzmann distribution, along with the Minimal Description Length principle to find and model vowel harmony...

The two most controversial aspects of vowel harmony in Korean ideophones are its morphologically restricted nature and the harmonic feature governing these alternations. Not only is the harmony pattern restricted to the ideophone class2, but also the value of the harmonic feature determines the meaning of the ideophone itself. While alternations from one feature to another involve relative lowe...

Harmony is a process by which a feature spreads throughout a word or some other domain. The segment that initiates harmony is referred to as the trigger, and those that undergo harmony are its targets. Some segments seemingly do not participate in harmony; these are called neutral segments, and they are of two types. Transparent segments are those that do not undergo harmony but do not stop it ...