“It will discourse most eloquent music”: Sonifying Variants of Hamlet

Abstract

Sonification is a complementary technique to visualization that uses sound to describe relationships in data. We describe work to aid exploratory textual analysis by sonifying textual variants. The sonification presented focuses on using pitch and tones to help the user listen to differences in the structure between variations of a text or texts encoded in Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) XML. Extracting hyperstructures, we describe our conversion of TEI elements and attributes into sounds for a listener. We discuss our approaches to creating the sounds used to represent the data from the Bodleian Libraries’ First Folio project and early visualizations, and we consider the issues raised by the use of this novel technique. The use of sound provides an exciting alternative way of exploring textual structures to determine differences between them. While the novelty in this area is a major challenge, we suggest that this method can be useful in the exploration of variants between texts marked up with TEI.