Tools for Listening to Texts-in-Performance

FAIN: HAA-258799-18

Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208-0001)
Neil Kanwar Harish Verma (Project Director: June 2017 to June 2021)
Marit MacArthur (Co Project Director: August 2017 to June 2021)

The development of tools to allow humanistic researchers to analyze recorded literary and cultural materials ranging from poems, radio plays, and books to political speeches and sermons.

Audio archives provide tremendous resources for studying texts-in-performance, performance styles, and media history and formats. Such research requires tools that work well on low-quality, noisy audio common in humanities research, e.g., poetry readings, radio plays, and talking books, the datasets for this project. The proposed project will develop, provide access to, and support humanistic research using two state-of-the-art, open-source, user-friendly tools, Gentle and Drift. Drawing on advanced speech recognition and signal processing algorithms, Gentle and Drift visualize and quantify prosodic, expressive features of speech, including pitch range, intonation patterns, intensity, and rhythm. The project will also train a network of scholars in using these tools, and solicit and apply their feedback to develop new features to fit their needs. In so doing, the project will provide practical tools, broaden the community of users and develop new digital humanities research on sound.