Presented at TEI 2015 Conference, Lyon. Discusses the sonification experiments with Hamlet and some of the issues discovered doing this.

1. “It will discourse most eloquent music”
Sonifying Variants of Hamlet
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
• Visualization
• Conclusions
• 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)
3

4. Introduction to Sonification
• TEI-Comparator – James Cummings and Arno
Mittelbach
• Listening to Wikipedia - Hatnote
• We Need Us - Julie Freeman
• Sonification of hyperstructures - De Roure,
Blackburn et al.
4

5. Hinman Collator image
By Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC (Julie Ainsworth, photographer)
(http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/919x31) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

6. Sonifying Hamlet
6
• Sonifying the Variants
• Auditory Beacons
• Visualization

7. 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
7
Sonification

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

9. Visualization
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• Use of Processing visual arts language
• Reused the note data to create images

10. Conclusions
• Sonification has potential in comparing texts
• Perceptions altered
– Choices of sound
– Use of multiple parameters
• Use of spatial as well as temporal events to
help users
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11. Future Work
• Work on different sounds for elements
• Transforming and linking the structures
• Sonifying speeches with the choice elements
• Using metadata for additional sonification
– Perceptions of speaker’s characteristics through pitches
– Characteristics of speech: blank prose and rhyme
• Filtering

12. Acknowledgements
• The work is part of an MSc project in Software Engineering being
supported by the Oxford e-Research Centre.
• Thanks to Pip Willcox, 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

13. Thank you for listening
Any questions?
iain.emsley@oerc.ox.ac.uk
@iainemsley
@minnelieder
13

14. References
Gregory Kramer. 1993. Auditory Display: Sonification, Audification, and Auditory Interfaces. Perseus Publishing.
`The Search for the “Killer Application”: Drawing the Boundaries around the Sonification of Scientific Data`, Supper, Alexandra in The Oxford Handbook of
Sound Studies, Pinch, Trevor, and Bijsterveld, Karin 2012. New York: Oxford University Press, New York, p253
Keith V. Nesbitt and Stephen Barrass, Finding Trading Patterns in Stock Market Data, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 24:5, IEEE Computer
Society, pp 45-55, 2004
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/
C Hinman, Mechanized collation; a preliminary report., Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 41 (1947): 99-106.
Smith, Steven Escar. 2000. "'The Eternal Verities Verified': Charlton Hinman and the Roots of Mechanical Collation." Studies in Bibliography 53. 129-62.
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 editionHamlet, Second Quarto Variant, 1605. British Library Shelfmark: C.34.k.2,
http://www.quartos.org/XML_Orig/ham-1605-22276a-bli-c01_orig.xml
The Holinshed Project: Comparing and linking two editions of Holinshed's Chronicle, James Cummings and Arno Mittelbach, International Journal of
Humanities and Arts Computing. Volume 4, Issue 1-2, Page 39-53, ISSN 1753- 8548, Available Online http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ijhac.2011.0006 October
2010,
Keith V. Nesbitt and Stephen Barrass, of a Multimodal Sonification and Visualisation of Depth of Market Stock Data,. Nakatsu and H. Kawahara (eds),
International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), 2002 , pp2—5
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.
Holden, Claire 2012. Recreating early 19th- century style in a 21st-century marketplace: An orchestral violinist’s perspective. Presented at: Institute of
Musical Research DeNote Seminar, Senate House, London, 30 January 2012.
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) by G. Kramer, B. Walker, T. Bonebright, et al., http://sonify.psych.gatech.edu/publications/pdfs/1999-NSF-Report.pdf
Lehmann, L., Mittelbach, A., Cummings, J., Rensing, C., & Steinmetz, R. 2010. Automatic Detection and Visualisation of Overlap for Tracking of Information
Flow. In Proceedings I-Know.
William W. Gaver. 1986. Auditory icons: using sound in computer interfaces. Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, 2 (June 1986), 167-177.
DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327051hci0202_3