Juraj Hamar - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Juraj Hamar

Slovenský Národopis, 2017

Thematically, this article focuses on the interpretation of carnival pictures in folk songs. In t... more Thematically, this article focuses on the interpretation of carnival pictures in folk songs. In terms of source material, it is based on published sources, mostly songs from the author's field research conducted in Slovakia, including a comparative reflection of the repertoires of other Slavic nations (Czechia, Moravia, Transcarpathia, Poland, Serbia). The author concentrated on that part of the traditional repertoire which relates to the laughter carnival culture from the point of view of archetypes,as highlighted by M. M. Bachtin in his work François Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This mainly relates to the aestheticism and poeticism of the carnival world and the grotesque concept of the body in folk songs. The article presents this issue through pictures of eating and drinking; food and drinks; personal hygiene; emptying and excrements, sexual acts, the human body; old-age, death and after-death life; animals and things.

Journal of Ethnology, 2012

Journal of Ethnology, 2014

The paper deals with the processes that are behind the creation of the lists of intangible cultur... more The paper deals with the processes that are behind the creation of the lists of intangible cultural heritage at the national and especially the international level (UNESCO). It analyses the role of official documents, directives, materials, recommendations, etc. from the “workshop” of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003) which plays a recommending role in the procedure of creation of the nomination registers of intangible cultural heritage which should be inscribed on one of the UNESCO Lists. Based on the participating observation from the sessions of the Intergovernmental committee (in 2013 and 2014) and the General Assembly of the 2013 Convention (in 2014) as well as written materials, the contribution shows with particular examples how necessary it is to maintain a balance between the ideas of communities (bearers of traditions), the scientific approach of experts (ethnologists, ethnomusicologists, ethnochoreologists, museologists…), interests of the member states to the 2003 Convention and UNESCO rules in the course of the nomination of particular elements.

Journal of Ethnology, 2015

The paper presents the concept and realization of the intelligent audio-book reader for the visua... more The paper presents the concept and realization of the intelligent audio-book reader for the visually impaired. The system is capable of presenting personalities of different characters. The synthesizer mimics the way how a puppeteer portrays different characters. A traditional puppeteer generally uses up to a dozen different marionettes in one piece. Each of them impersonates a character with its own typical voice manifestation. We studied the techniques the puppeteer uses to change his voice and the acoustical correlates of these changes. The results are used to predict appropriate settings of the parameters of the voice for every character of the piece. The information on the personality features of every particular character is inserted manually by a human operator. Similarly to the puppeteer's show only one speaker's voice is used in this concept and all the modifications are made using speech synthesis methods.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

A traditional puppeteer generally uses up to a dozen different marionettes in one piece. Each of ... more A traditional puppeteer generally uses up to a dozen different marionettes in one piece. Each of them impersonates a character with its own typical voice manifestation. It is therefore very interesting to study the techniques the puppeteer uses to change his voice and their acoustical correlates. This study becomes even more interesting when a traditional style exists that has been respected by the puppeteers for more than a century. Thus we decided to make use of the fact that there are records available of several pieces played by Bohuslav Anderle (1913-1976) and we recorded parts of the same plays played by his son, Anton Anderle (1944), supplemented by his verbal description of personality features of the characters that the actor tries to express in their voices. A summary of variety of characters one puppeteer has to master is given and the psychological, aesthetic and acoustic-phonetic aspects of their personalities are discussed. The main goal of the paper is to present a classification of voice displays of characters, techniques of voice changes, and their acoustic correlates.

2012 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications (CogInfoCom), 2012

ABSTRACT Puppeteering represents a traditional but slowly dying folk art in which impersonation b... more ABSTRACT Puppeteering represents a traditional but slowly dying folk art in which impersonation based on modifying the puppeteer's voice belongs among the core expressive and stylistic devices. A study of the formal and functional aspects of voice quality and other prosodic features in puppeteers' production as well as their acoustic correlates is thus an integral part of studies into communicative social signals especially in emotional and expressive speech. This analysis becomes even more relevant in cases when puppeteers' performance represents a very salient communication code in a particular culture. Better understanding of such traditional code opens possibilities of applications into several speech processing domains. Our data consist of recordings of plays and excerpts by two puppeteers (a father and a son) and verbal descriptions of personality features of the characters that the actor tries to express through their voices. We propose an approach to the taxonomy of archetypal characters based on analyzing the psychological, aesthetic and acoustic-phonetic aspects of their personalities. More specifically, we identify salient links between acoustic-prosodic features on the one hand and semantic and personality features on the other hand.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008

The prosody model is one of the most important parts of every speech synthesizer, influencing mai... more The prosody model is one of the most important parts of every speech synthesizer, influencing mainly its naturalness. The intonation contour and durations of phonemes (together with speech quality) bear a great deal of extralinguistic and paralinguistic information contained in the synthesized speech. The features reflecting personality, mood and emotions of the speaker are in strong interaction with those reflecting speech styles. Anyway, the appropriate choice of a prosody model and training material can make it possible to create a special model for every speaking style.