Beatology: Identifying beat components in co-speech gestures
An international workshop, 7-8 October 2025
As research into multimodal aspects of communication advances, greater attention is being directed toward the beat-like nature of many co-speech gestures, and to the characterization of the temporal links between such gestures and the speech signal. Identifying beats in multimodal data analysis often relies on impressionistic inferences made by human annotators and on study-specific criteria for machine annotation of visible body gestures. More robust objective principles for this identification task are so far overlooked or not widely shared. This situation also makes it hard to compare and accumulate findings from different studies effectively.
In this workshop, we will endeavor to address this challenge and establish a comprehensive set of principles and criteria for reliable beat identification, both from a qualitative and a quantitative perspective, that could be adopted by diverse research groups. The workshop is spread over two days — one day for talks and another day for discussions.
You’ll find the complete workshop program below, or you can download the PDF version.
Tuesday, 7.10.2025, 09.30-18.00 IBW-Gebäude (Herbert-Lewin-Straße 2); Hörsaal H 114
The first day will feature a series of presentations by invited experts in the field (see invited speakers) in a large lecture hall. They will cover a range of key topics, including:
The biomechanics of speech and co-speech gestures
Speech and gesture timing models
Characteristics of single beats (abrupt vs. smooth transitions)
Characteristics of repetitive beats (coupled vs. self-oscillatory)
When the presentations are over, a dinner will take place (expenses are not covered by the workshop), at Brauhaus Pütz, Engelbertstr. 67, 50674 Köln, starting at 19:00.
Wednesday, 8.10.2025, 10:30–16:00: House of Prominence (Luxemburger Straße 299); Spitzboden (top floor)
The second day of the workshop will consist of discussion groups in the seminar room of the House of Prominence (the building of CRC 1252 "Prominence in Language").
You can find the open discussions document here.
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| Day 1 – 7.10.2025 – IBW-Gebäude (Herbert-Lewin-Straße 2); Hörsaal H 114 | |
| 09:45–10:00 | Greetings |
| 10:00–11:00 | Patrick Rohrer: “What makes a beat? Disentangling the prosodic properties of co-speech gestures.” |
| 11:00–11:30 | Coffee Break |
| 11:30–12:30 | Silva Ladewig: “Identifying beat components with recurrent gesture repertoires.” |
| 12:30–14:00 | Lunch Break (provided) |
| 14:00–15:00 | Khalil Iskarous & Simon Roessig: “The Dynamics of Coordination, From Haken-Kelso-Bunz to Generative AI.” |
| 15:00–15:30 | Coffee Break |
| 15:30–16:30 | Wim Pouw: "Where is the beat in gesture-speech physics?" |
| 16:30–17:00 | Coffee Break |
| 17:00–18:00 | Shuguang Sheng: "Muscle prosody: A further step toward understanding functional gesture-speech physics" |
| Day 2 – 8.10.2025 – House of Prominence (Luxemburger Straße 299); Spitzboden (top floor) | |
| 10:30–12:30 | Discussion Session #1 |
| 12:30–14:00 | Lunch Break (provided) |
| 14:00–16:00 | Discussion Session #2 |