Det er jo min elskede Salomon – eller er det?

The new Bible translation, Bibelen 2020, makes biblical books accessible to readers with little prior knowledge of the Bible, in idiomatic, contemporary Danish. However, the article argues that the attempt to make the texts accessible may have problematic consequences when the translation directly reflects one specific interpretation. This is particularly the case in the Song of Songs. Bibelen 2020 indicates the speaker of each passage, and the introduction identifies one female speaker (“Sulamit”) and one male (her beloved “Salomon”). In a very problematic way, this interpretation and the idea that the beloved is “Salomon”, referred to as “king”, have been built into the translation. The article discusses the once popular interpretation of the book as a drama including one woman and two men and argues that elements of such an approach can illuminate important aspects of the text. It is argued that these aspects are largely lost in the translation in Bibelen 2020.

Analysis and Assessment of Controllability of an Expressive Deep Learning-Based TTS System

In this paper, we study the controllability of an Expressive TTS system trained on a dataset for a continuous control. The dataset is the Blizzard 2013 dataset based on audiobooks read by a female speaker containing a great variability in styles and expressiveness. Controllability is evaluated with both an objective and a subjective experiment. The objective assessment is based on a measure of correlation between acoustic features and the dimensions of the latent space representing expressiveness. The subjective assessment is based on a perceptual experiment in which users are shown an interface for Controllable Expressive TTS and asked to retrieve a synthetic utterance whose expressiveness subjectively corresponds to that a reference utterance.

Circe’s Instructions as a Sibylline Oracle

This chapter argues that the instructional oracle was a short hexametrical genre known to the Homeric poet and that he used it to frame the detailed instructions that Circe and Tiresias give Odysseus in the Iliad. It offers a close reading of the two parts of Circe’s advice to Odysseus and compares Circe’s advice with that offered to the initiate in the “Orphic” gold tablets and to Odysseus by Nausicaa in Odyssey 6. It examines, as well, the prophetic speeches of Tiresias in Odyssey 11 and of Eidotheia and Proteus in Odyssey 3, in order to show how the doubling of the prophetic scenes in both places seems to diminish the authority of the local female speaker, in order to get the more panoramic and indeed Panhellenic viewpoints of Proteus and Tiresias. It closes by discussing the instructional oracles of the Erythraean Sibyl and suggests that she and the hexametrical oracles attributed to her were local models for Circe and her instructions to Odysseus.

Igbo Speech Surrogacy: Preliminary Findings Based on the Oja Flute

This research report presents analyses of recordings from the Ìgbò culture of southeastern Nigeria of an ọ̀jà flute player, a female speaker, and a male speaker. After a prepared performance, the participants completed two tasks: (1) mapping speech to flute playing and (2) identifying phrases played on the flute. Contour analysis is applied to annotated recordings to study the mapping of speech tone and rhythm from voice to instrument in parallel utterances by the three participants (male, female, and flute). Response time between the flute playing and spoken phrase identification indicates each prompt’s relative clarity. Using a limited but not predetermined inventory of related praise epithets, participants successfully converted speech to music and music to speech. In the conversion of speech to music, we found that declination was not part of the mapping, indicating it is a phonetic artifact of speech and does not carry a functional load. In identifying surrogate phrases played on the flute (music to speech), we found that dialectical variation caused some misidentification because idioms known in one area of the Igbo dialect cluster are not necessarily known throughout the region. However, òòjà speech surrogacy is found throughout the region. Possibilities and predictions for further research are presented.

Glides are high vowels in onsets and codas: A case of Southern Vietnamese

Glides, /j/ and /w/, are recognized as semivowels in Vietnamese, and they are conventionally and widely written as /i̯/ and /u̯/, respectively (Phạm & Mcleod 2016, Tran, Vallée & Granjon 2019). The implication of the conventional transcription of the two semivowels is that they are non-syllabic /i/ and /u/, suggesting that /i̯/ and /u̯/ might have similar or nearly identical acoustic properties with the two high vowels /i/ and /u/. As the semivowels are only allowed in onsets and codas, and the vowels are allowed in nuclei (Kirby 2011, Phạm & Mcleod 2016, Brunelle 2017, Tran et al. 2019), the only difference between the two semivowels and the two vowels might be where they can appear. That is, the semivowels might be non-syllabic positional variants of the high vowels that appear in onsets and codas (Levi, 2008). To examine this hypothesis, audio files in which a native female speaker of Southern Vietnamese recites the 200 Swadesh words in her dialect were collected, and the first formant (F1) and the second formant (F2) of each word that contains either /i/, /u/, /i̯/ or /u̯/ were measured using Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2020). Analyses on the F1 showed no significant difference on the F1 between /i/ and /i̯/ (p = .97) or /u/ and /u̯/ (p = .78). Similarly, there was no significant difference on the F2 between /i/ and /i̯/ (p = .91) or /u/ and /u̯/ (p = .91). The results support that /i/ and /i̯/ as well as /u/ and /u̯/ have nearly identical phonetic properties.

Gender, Politics, Performance

The chapter introduces the reader to selected frames that are valuable in work on gender and political representation: embodiment, authenticity, and performative labor of (especially symbolic) representation. The chapter illustrates the dominant scripts of political representation and appeals to situated knowledge during claim-making in the Indian national parliament; the policing of gendered and religious behavioral scripts for authentic representation of minority women in Indian politics; salient intersections of caste, gender, and embodiment in the performance of symbolic representation in the election of India’s first female Speaker in Parliament; and more localized scripts of performing gender in party political spaces. It discusses the performances of women legislators in institutional and noninstitutional spaces with the aim of illustrating the intellectual and practical merits of applying a performance-based approach to analyzing gender and politics.

The Voice Gives It Away

Two experiments examined the impact of voice pitch on gender stereotyping. Participants listened to a text read by a female (Study 1; N = 171) or male (Study 2, N = 151) speaker, whose voice pitch was manipulated to be high or low. They rated the speaker on positive and negative facets of masculinity and femininity, competence, and likability. They also indicated their own gendered self-concept. High pitch was associated with the ascription of more feminine traits and greater likability. The high-pitch female speaker was rated as less competent, and the high-pitch male speaker was perceived as less masculine. Text content and participants’ gendered self-concept did not moderate the pitch effect. The findings underline the importance of voice pitch for impression formation.