"It will discourse most eloquent music" : sonifying Hamlet

Visualisation is an established way of understanding data. Sonification can be seen as a complimentary way of analyzing structures. I present my ongoing work that uses sound to express structures within dramatic texts for analysis. Dramatic works can be seen as being made up of internal structures that are of interest to users. Acts, scenes, speakers and stage directions were extracted and the events transformed into audio output. This allows the user to understand the structural events within the context of the work using different audio identifiers. This work poses challenges in building audio analytical tools to help the user understand the data and how textual variants interact with each other. One challenge is how to present the sound to the user. Can we change the perception using the sounds and music that are contemporary to the work, or radically modern? How does sound affect the perception of the speaker’s gender and variances of gender roles within a particular play? The sonified data provides an exploratory way of identifying structural changes in the textual data. Using two streams poses technical challenges in making the audio understandable. Variations in timing allow for the structural changes to be more apparent and affect user perception. The Bodleian’s First Folio edition of Hamlet was the first text to be sonified for this work. Current work is the exploration of the texts from the Quartos project and sonifying variants of the Hamlet text.