The National Endowment for the Humanities has bestowed a $75,000 grant to be used toward developing tools to analyze sound recordings by Orson Welles and other performers.
The international team receiving the Digital Humanities Advancement Grant is co-led by Marit MacArthur and Neil Verma. MacArthur is a lecturer in the University of California at Davis’ Writing Program and a research associate in its Department of Cinema and Digital Media. Verma is an assistant professor of radio/TV/film at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
The digital tools will be open-source for scholars to mine new knowledge from archives of sound recordings, according to a statement issued by UC Davis. The recordings include Welles’ radio programs, the 75-year Talking Book Collection for the blind, and thousands of hours of poets’ reading their works
The MacArthur-Verma led team involves a large number of scholars from around the world as consultants, advisers and user-testers.
“We all have strong responses to people’s manner of speaking, to the qualities of their voices, from film and television actors, to radio and TV personalities, to politicians and poets. Yet speech perception is highly subjective, inflected by all sorts of biases, expectations and preferences. Why do we like the voices we like? What turns us off about others?,” MacArthur said. “A primary goal is to enable scholars across the humanities disciplines to study speech recordings in new ways, and to promote interdisciplinary collaboration in what I might call the empirical study of performative speech.”
She added, “We humanists have tremendous cultural and historical knowledge and intuitions, for instance, about the evolution of performance styles and their reception in particular contexts. But the available linguistic tools and methods for analyzing speech recordings just aren’t made for us. They aren’t easy to use, and they aren’t adapted for the noisier and longer recordings we want to study. The tools our team has developed so far, which the project will refine and disseminate, should make this sort of scholarship much easier to do, and make the results more understandable to wider audiences.”
Recently, Indiana University launched the website, Orson Welles on the Air: Radio Recordings and Scripts, 1938-1946. The university digitized the Lilly Library’s extensive collection of analog recordings and made them available to the public online at https://orsonwelles.indiana.edu
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