This document describes Dr. Caroline Ardrey's research projects involving the digital analysis of poetry performance through audio recordings. The main projects are the Baudelaire Song Project, which analyzes over 1100 songs set to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, and Visualising Voice, which develops tools for visually representing linguistic features in audio recordings of poetry performances. The goals are to map the historical reception of Baudelaire in song and engage non-specialist audiences with open-access audio archives through a web-based interface showing analysis of poetic form, stress patterns, and other linguistic elements. Challenges include standardizing the methodology across languages, obtaining a sufficient range of recordings, and addressing copyright and storage issues that arise

1. Visualising Voices
developing linguistically versatile
digital audio analysis methods for
poetry in performance
Dr Caroline Ardrey, The University of Birmingham

2. Projects
The Baudelaire Song Project (AHRC-funded 2015 -2019) @baudelaireproj
Visualising Voice (Europeana Research Award, 2017)
• PI: Prof Helen Abbott (Modern Languages, University of Birmingham)
• Co-I: Dr Mylène Dubiau (Musicology, Université Toulouse, Jean-Jaurès)
• External Consultant: Dr Caroline Potter (French Musicology, Kingston University)
• Research Associate: Dr Caroline Ardrey (Modern Languages, University of Birmingham)
• Research Associate: Dr Caroline Ardrey (Modern Languages, University of Birmingham)
• Software Developer: Tom Cowley (Ed tech specialist, Red Circle Software)

3. • Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (New York,
NY: OUP, 2014)
• Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to
Studying Recorded Musical Performance (London: CHARM, 2009)
• Charles Bernstein (PennSound), Close Listening: Poetry and the
Performed Word (New York, NY: OUP, 1998)
• Tanya Clement (PennSound), “Distant Listening or Playing
Visualisations Pleasantly with the Eyes and Ears”, Digital Studies / Le
Champ Numérique, 3, 2 (2012)
Digital Sound & Voice Studies

4. The Baudelaire Song Project

5. Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)
• Verse: Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)
• Prose: Le Spleen de Paris / Petits poèmes en
prose (1868)

6. The Baudelaire Song Project
• 4 years of AHRC funding
• Core team of 3 researchers
• Interdisciplinary – word & music studies
• Database  broad overview of reception of Baudelaire in song
• Analyses  close listening (cf. Nicholas Cook)
• Working with digital sources / resources (audio files)
• Analyses largely dealing with songs in original French
• Strategies for dealing with other languages

7. Baudelaire in Song
• There are currently over 1100 songs in
the Baudelaire Song Project database
• Patterns begin to emerge amongst
certain groups of composers / singers
• Baudelaire’s reception history in song
can be mapped visually tracing
personal and professional links
between composers, songwriters and
singers
• The graph on the left represents a
small cross-section of the relationships
between composers setting Baudelaire
to music in the 19th & 20th centuries

8. Song Analysis Markup in
Sonic Visualiser

9. Louis Vierne, “Recueillement” (1921)
(sonnet by Baudelaire)
From Voice to Visualisation

10. Claude Debussy “La Mort des amants” (1890)
Poem structure layer data (SV export)
Sonnet form in French 14 lines 
Q1 – 4 lines
Q2 – 4 lines
--- volta ---
T1 – 3 lines
T2 – 3 lines
R = rest period (i.e. silence / instrumental interlude)

11. Visualising Voice

12. Visualising Voice
• Europeana Research Award (6 months)
• 1 researcher (me!) + 1 (main) software developer (non-academic)
• Public-facing focus
• Encourages users to engage with open-access digital archival materials
• Uses digital sources / resources (audio files)
• Simple, web-based interface for digital analysis
• Currently exploring strategies for working with other languages
• Potential for use in a pedagogical environment
https://visualisingvoice.eu

13. Paul Verlaine
(1844 – 1896)
Author: Otto Wegener (1849-1922)
Source: NYPL (CC-PD-Mark)
Author: Étienne Carjat (1828-1906)
Source: NYPL (CC-BY-2.0)
Arthur Rimbaud
(1854 – 1891)

14. Explore the Visualising Voice tool for yourself
https://visualisingvoice.eu
Visualising Voice: User Interface

19. Challenges of digital audio
analysis• Public engagement  how to make multilingual material accessible to a
broad / non-specialist audience?
• How to “standardize” the methodology?
• Need to work together with academics from different languages, from
audio analysis, from performance studies and musicology
• Availability of a sufficient / suitable range of audio recordings
• Quality of recordings affects accuracy of output
• Ethical approval needed for user-generated content
• Storage issues – both legal / ethical and in terms of file sizes!
• Working with digital audio materials brings copyright / legal issues

20. How to build-in linguistic versatility?
• Projects developed to deal with conventions of French versification
• Even simplified this still has something to tell us about speech in
general
• Questions over stress patterns in other languages – stress doesn’t
necessarily mean emphasis
• Need to work with specialists in poetry and in linguistics
• Underscores the collaborative aspect of work in the digital humanities
• Parallels between interdisciplinarity of ML and DH