CONVERSATIONAL INTERACTIVITY IN SLOW-MOTION A COMPARISON OF PHONE DIALOGUES AND OPERA SCENE.pdf

CONVERSATIONAL INTERACTIVITY IN SLOW-MOTION: A COMPARISON OF PHONE DIALOGUES AND OPERA SCENES Peter Reichl, Florian Hammer Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.) Donaucitystr. 1, A-1220 Vienna, Austria {reichl; hammer}@ftw.at Marena Balinova doremi art management Seligerstrasse 3, D-91781 Weissenburg, Germany balinova@gmx.net ABSTRACT 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 transmis- sion technologies. A quantitative description of interac- tivity either relies on (subjective) user tests or on instru- mental (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 spe- cial examples, in this paper we investigate the charac- teristics of opera duets and larger ensemble scenes with respect to interactivity models like Parametric Conver- sation Analysis, Conversational Temperature or Con- versational Entropy. After introducing the basic mea- surement framework and reviewing related experi- ments 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 conversa- tions in slow-motion. This may lead to important con- clusions for telecommunication networks as well as for the design of interactive sound systems and the parame- trization of algorithmic composition tools. 1. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION The integration of multimedia applications over packet- based transmission technologies lik