Compared to visualization, approaching textual analysis through sonification is under-studied. This presentation discussed existing work experimenting with Shakespeare's Hamlet for a workshop on designing auditory displays for Early Modern Drama held at the Bodleian's Weston library, 17 November 2015.

1. "Will you play upon this"?
Designing Auditory Displays for Early
Modern Drama
Iain Emsley
Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford
iain.emsley@oerc.ox.ac.uk
@iainemsley
@minnelieder
1

2. Overview
• Introduction to Sonification
• Sonifying Hamlet
• Auditory Beacons
• Questions?
• Future Work
2

3. Introduction to Sonification
• What is sonification?
– Sonification is an alternative to visualization
“the use of nonspeech audio to convey information. More
specifically, sonification is the transformation of data
relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for
the purposes of facilitating communication or
interpretation.”
(Kramer, 1997) (bold is mine)
• Using it for analysis
3

4. A better place?
“the use of nonspeech audio to convey information. More
specifically, sonification is the transformation of data
relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for
the purposes of facilitating communication or
interpretation.”
(Kramer, 1997)

5. Sonifying Hamlet
5
• Sonifying the Variants
• Auditory Beacons
• Visualization

6. Sonifying the Variants
• From Play to Sonification
• Using First Folio and Quartos data
• Parsing the TEI XML, converting it with rule set into numbers,
sonifying the data to produce sounds
6
Sonification

7. Auditory Beacons
• Acts and Scenes
– Different Instruments and Pitches
• Stage Directions
– Different instruments
– Period versus Modern sounds?
• Speakers
– Increasing volume
– Binaural illusion using two streams

8. Questions?
• What sort of sounds might help analysis?
– Period sounds?
– Modern Sounds?
• Timing
• Related applications
– Search in documents
• User testing
• Transforming the data into other forms
– TEI to MEI?
• Tessitura of a speaker’s lines
8

9. Future Work
• Discussion of theoretical approach
• Developing some of these sounds
• Testing the sounds in environments
• Write report or paper on the outcomes

10. Acknowledgements
• The work is part of an MSc project in Software Engineering being
supported by the Oxford e-Research Centre.
• Oxford e-Research Centre
• The Centre for Digital Scholarship
• Fusing Audio and Semantic Technologies project
@semanticaudio #FAST_IMPACt
• Particular thanks to Rahim Lakhoo and Professor David De Roure.
“It will discourse most eloquent music”: Sonifying variants of Hamlet
http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1785e0ac-5cbb-4d35-8546-4495aa8baec8

11. References
Digital facsimile of the Bodleian First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, Arch. G c.7, First Folio home page,
http://firstfolio.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
The tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke: an electronic edition, Hamlet, First Quarto, 1603. British Library Shelfmark:
C.34.k.1, http://www.quartos.org/XML_Orig/ham-1603-22275x-bli-c01_orig.xml
The tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke: an electronic edition, Hamlet, Second Quarto Variant, 1605. British
Library Shelfmark: C.34.k.2, http://www.quartos.org/XML_Orig/ham-1605-22276a-bli-c01_orig.xml
De Roure, David C., Cruickshank, Don G., Michaelides, Danius T., Page, Kevin R. and Weal, Mark J. (2002) On
Hyperstructure and Musical Structure. The Thirteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hypertext
2002), Maryland, USA, 11 - 15 Jun 2002. ACM, 95-104.
William W. Gaver. 1986. Auditory icons: using sound in computer interfaces. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, 2 (June 1986),
167-177. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327051hci0202_3
The Sonification Handbook, Edited by Thomas Hermann, Andy Hunt, John G. Neuhoff Logos Publishing House, Berlin
2011, 586 pages, 1. edition (11/2011)
Gregory Kramer. 1993. Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification, and Auditory Interfaces. Perseus Publishing.
G. Kramer, B. Walker, T. Bonebright, et al., Sonification report: Status of the field and research agenda Prepared for
the National Science Foundation by members of the International Community for Auditory Display (1997)
http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/publications/pdfs/1999-NSF-Report.pdf
Alexandra Supper. "Sound Information: Sonification in the Age of Complex Data and Digital Audio." Information &
Culture: A Journal of History 50.4 (2015): 441-464. Project MUSE. Web. 30 Oct. 2015. <https://muse.jhu.edu/>.
The Search for the'Killer Application': Drawing the Boundaries around the Sonification of Scientific Data, A Supper, in
KT Bijsterveld, TJ Pinch - The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012)