Bidirectional Interactions With Humpback Whale Singer Using Concrete Sound Elements.

We describe an art-science project called "Feral Interactions-The Answer of the Humpback Whale" inspired by humpback whale songs and interactions between individuals based on mutual influences, learning process, or ranking in the dominance hierarchy. The aim was to build new sounds that can be used to initiate acoustic interactions with these whales, not in a one-way direction, as playbacks do, but in real interspecies exchanges. Thus, we investigated how the humpback whales generate sounds in order to better understand their abilities and limits. By carefully listening to their emitted vocalizations, we also describe their acoustic features and temporal structure, in a scientific way and also with a musical approach as it is done with musique concrète, in order to specify the types and the morphologies of whale sounds. The idea is to highlight the most precise information to generate our own sounds that will be suggested to the whales. Based on the approach developed in musique concrète, similarities with the sounds produced by bassoon were identified and then were processed to become "concrete sound elements." This analysis also brought us to design a new music interface that allows us to create adapted musical phrases in real-time. With this approach, interactions will be possible in both directions, from and to whales.

Musical coordination in a large group without plans nor leaders.

A widespread belief is that large groups engaged in joint actions that require a high level of flexibility are unable to coordinate without the introduction of additional resources such as shared plans or hierarchical organizations. Here, we put this belief to a test, by empirically investigating coordination within a large group of 16 musicians performing collective free improvisation-a genre in which improvisers aim at creating music that is as complex and unprecedented as possible without relying on shared plans or on an external conductor. We show that musicians freely improvising within a large ensemble can achieve significant levels of coordination, both at the level of their musical actions (i.e., their individual decisions to play or to stop playing) and at the level of their directional intentions (i.e., their intentions to change or to support the music produced by the group). Taken together, these results invite us to reconsider the range and scope of actions achievable by large groups, and to explore alternative organizational models that emphasize decentralized and unscripted forms of collective behavior.

Sensus Communis: Some Perspectives on the Origins of Non-synchronous Cross-Sensory Associations.

Adults readily make associations between stimuli perceived consecutively through different sense modalities, such as shapes and sounds. Researchers have only recently begun to investigate such correspondences in infants but only a handful of studies have focused on infants less than a year old. Are infants able to make cross-sensory correspondences from birth? Do certain correspondences require extensive real-world experience? Some studies have shown that newborns are able to match stimuli perceived in different sense modalities. Yet, the origins and mechanisms underlying these abilities are unclear. The present paper explores these questions and reviews some hypotheses on the emergence and early development of cross-sensory associations and their possible links with language development. Indeed, if infants can perceive cross-sensory correspondences between events that share certain features but are not strictly contingent or co-located, one may posit that they are using a "sixth sense" in Aristotle's sense of the term. And a likely candidate for explaining this mechanism, as Aristotle suggested, is movement.