Slow Listening: Digital Tools for Voice Studies

Sound studies in general, and voice studies in particular, present particular challenges for digital humanities scholarship. The software tools available to digital humanists who want to study performative speech are less familiar and less developed for our uses, and the user base is also much smaller than for text mining or network analysis. This article provides a critical narrative of our research and an outline of our methodology, in applying, developing and refining tools for the analysis of pitch and timing patterns in recorded performances of literary texts. The primary texts and audio considered are poetry readings, but the tools and methods can and have been applied more widely to podcasts, talking books, political speeches, etc.