Poetry scansion program

To begin to look at graphic scansion, we first must look at a couple of symbols that are used to scan a poem. Syllables can either be accented , meaning they are naturally given more emphasis when spoken, or unaccented , meaning they receive less emphasis when spoken. A poetic foot is a unit of accented and unaccented syllables that is repeated or used in sequence with others to form the meter. A caesura is a long pause in the middle of a line of poetry.

To show an example of these symbols, let's look at a poem written with the less common, the accentual-syllabic meter, in mind. You can then see, when comparing the reading of the poem to the scansion marks, how they compare.

These lines are taken from a sonnet and thus somewhat predictably written in iambic pentameter. The term iambic pentameter often comes up in discussions of Shakespeare or any sonneteer, but the meaning of the term is often mistaken or simply overlooked.

Defining iambic pentameter helps us break down two important parts of meter: poetic feet and line length. Meter and Scansion Summary: A brief exploration of the various aspects of sound that can be utilized when making a poem. So when we encounter patterns that repeat over and over, both our subjective engagement as well as our neural responses tend to wane—a process called habituation. While he uses the same monotone cadence over many long lines, we are lulled—pleasantly or unpleasantly—and we probably attend less to what he is saying, because the prosody is uninformative.

At the same time, his vocal pitch level is gradually rising, and that may help keep our attention, as it suggests change or intensification in mood. But though we all share this heuristic, we are still individuals.

Having different brains with different experiential histories means that we engage the world with different statistical predictions. So when we listen to a recorded poem, what counts as boring or too complex depends on our internal models, our predictions, which are in turn based on our previous experiences of listening to and reading poetry.

Monotonous or otherwise highly repetitive prosodic patterns in poetry reading may comfort some listeners and bore others, while more idiosyncratic prosodic patterns in poetry reading may annoy the former and reward the latter. In attending to the complex perceptual experience of listening to poetry in more detail, we are actually honoring the initial intent of I.

Richards, whose work on poetry was deeply influenced by his collaboration with the linguist C. And he also warned against the oversimplification of rhythm through metrical analysis, which scansion has encouraged:. It is a survivor which is still able to do a great deal of harm to the uninitiated…. Most treatises on the subject, with their talk of feet and of stresses, unfortunately tend to encourage it, however little this may be the aim of the authors.

As with rhythm so with metre, we must not think of it as in the words themselves or in the thumping of the drum. It is not in the stimulation, it is in our response.

Metre adds to all the variously fated expectancies which make of rhythm a definite temporal pattern and its effect is not due to our receiving a pattern in something outside us, but to our becoming patterned…. The notion that there is any virtue in regularity or in variety, or in any other formal feature, apart from its effects upon us, must be discarded before any metrical problem can be understood. A more serious omission is the neglect by the majority of metrists of the pitch relations of syllables.

The reading of poetry is of course not a monotonous and subdued form of singing. There is no question of definite pitches at which the syllables must be taken, nor perhaps of definite harmonic relations between different sounds. These particular warnings and insights from Richards about the oversimplifications of metrical analysis appear to have fallen on deaf ears, if the subsequent dominance of scansion is any measure.

It is true that, in , the available tools did not make it easy to study these phenomena empirically. That is no longer the case. Whatever the reason, the dominant system of graphic scansion, set out in many guides to versification, rhythm and meter, has encouraged many of the hazards Richards warned against, and has largely ignored pitch.

Prosodists use one of three systems of signs for scanning English verse: the graphic, the musical, and the acoustic…. Musical scansion does have the advantage of representing more accurately than graphic certain delicate differences in degree of stress: it is obvious to anyone that an English line has more than two prosodic kinds of syllables in it, and yet graphic scansion, preferring convenience to absolute accuracy, seems to give the impression that any syllable in a line is either clearly stressed or unstressed.

But musical scansion has perhaps a greater disadvantage than this kind of oversimplification; it is not only complex, but even worse tends to imply that poetry somehow follows musical principles…. The third method of scansion, the acoustic, translates poetic sounds into the marks on graph paper produced by such machines as the kymograph and the oscillograph.

Like musical scansion, this system has the advantage of accuracy, especially in its representations of many of the empirical phenomena of verse when it is actually spoken aloud; its disadvantages are its complexity, its novelty, and its incapacity to deal with rhythms which no speaker enunciates but which every silent reader feels. Musical scansion may do no harm to those already learned in musical theory; acoustic scansion may be useful to the linguist and the scientist of language; but graphic scansion is best for those who intend to become not merely accurate readers but also intelligent critics of English poetry [our italics].

More recent critics, such as T. Strictly speaking, scansion marks which syllables are metrically prominent—i. If it ever did, it no longer seems crucial to prioritize analysis of meter over the actual rhythms of performed poetry, especially given that so much poetry written and performed today is in open forms, or varieties of so-called free verse.

Nor are more complex methods of graphic scansion helpful. Their goal is to increase perception of subtlety and nuance in intonation and stress. In practice, they can overwhelm and confuse even expert readers of poetry. Wimsatt and Beardsley, for instance, in their system of four degrees of relative stress, attempt to capture subtleties of accent with more confusing visual complexity than a simple intonation or intensity contour, while insisting that their object of study is not the audible reading of a poem.

Of course, scansion cannot be held responsible for the neglect of the aural and oral experience of poetry, of the audio archive, and ignorance of complementary linguistic methods of studying prosody.

But it has not helped matters. Though this is often true, pitch is more variable and complex than a stress peak; intonation has shape, not simply highs and lows, and whether pitch is rising or falling, and how steeply, influences auditory perception and cognitive interpretation. Alan Holder, in Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line , takes particular exception to the metrical foot and begins to seriously investigate the role of pitch in metrical accent.

These methods allow us to attend to two crucial paralinguistic qualities, namely pitch and timing. We would like to mention here some crucial early and recent work on intonation in recorded poetry, including G. Our contribution offers a different emphasis: we want to democratize access to simple open-source tools for the study and teaching of poetic prosody and the history of poetic performance that do not require a great deal of technical skill or linguistic training.

This is not to diminish linguistic expertise—the understanding and interpretation of prosodic patterns requires considerable study—but to let students and scholars explore viable alternatives to scansion. As with other modes of performance, and in rough parallel with the evolution of acting, styles of poetry reading in the U.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the U. While we might agree with these presumptions—many talented songwriters and playwrights do not perform their songs and plays—modern and contemporary poets have long been expected to read their work to audiences, as audio recordings and sometimes recorded poetry readings help them gain recognition and supplement income from teaching.

When Frost gave readings, he chatted about poetry, art and politics, passing down an anecdotal, pedagogical reading style exemplified by popular contemporary poets such as Billy Collins. We need, however, to interrogate both this notion of neutrality and the opposition between the theatrical and the sincere, or the expressivist and the ostensibly neutral. Good Method acting, in short. How can we get beyond characterizing an allegedly neutral or allegedly expressive style reading style as sincere?

How can we be more precise about what we mean by expressive or neutral? What scansion misses or diminishes in our perception of prosody, in contemporary and historical performances of poetry, might well be restored with two approaches to the study and teaching of recorded poetry alongside the text. The first approach is, simply put, data visualization and analysis of pitch and timing. Not the complex acoustic spectrograms that Fussell might have feared, and which require considerable linguistic training to understand and analyze, but simple pitch contours, showing the intonation patterns of the voice in a recorded poem see Sampling the Prosody of Sixteen Poets , including breaks in the pitch contour and the waveform that show moments of silence, or pauses caesuras within lines and between lines except with very noisy older recordings, when background noise obscures the patterns of silence or pauses in the waveform, as with Whitman.

Related data about pitch and timing can also be statistically analyzed, for instance comparing pitch range in octaves and pitch velocity in octaves per second as a measure of expressivity, and applying quantitative measures of timing to explore rhythmic patterns of stress or accent and speaking rate or temp.

As mentioned below, timing information can also be used to verify whether a poet pauses at line breaks and caesuras marked with punctuation. The second approach, which we call vocal deformance introduced in our piece in Sounding Out! In practice, vocal deformance is machine-assisted manipulation of vocal recordings, which is very common in experimental and pop music production, from Lori Anderson to Justin Bieber. But aside from the work of some experimental poets, vocal deformance has not been applied much to poetry recordings or the teaching of poetry.

And there is lot we can learn from it. For our purposes, vocal deformance is essentially a playful strategy of defamiliarization that reminds us, in many ways, of the subjective, creative, even arbitrary nature of interpretation.

And even though, without deformance, we can listen to multiple performances of the same poem, and perform it in different ways ourselves, it can be difficult to break out of our own habitual speaking patterns. Or to find different recordings of the same poet reading with drastically different intonation patterns, much less as a different gender.

They take inspiration from Emily Dickinson, who sometimes liked to read poems backward, for the potential insights of reading against the form, scrambling the original sequence, and so on.

As an interpretive practice, vocal deformance opens up new possibilities for testing assumptions about performance, poetic authority and gender, and, potentially, about race, class, education, region, and canonicity. The same is true of gender difference and many other identity markers and cultural factors related to authority and authenticity.

An unusual or unfamiliar manner of speaking or reading a poem created through vocal deformance—particularly when it manipulates a known voice, as with canonical poets, or a familiar way of speaking, as with conventional poetry reading styles—waves a red flag at the brain. Change wakes up the quiescent, habitual brain to something new and potentially informative, because the voice does not fit our expectations for what the person would or should sound like.

By corollary, monotone performance is—at least acoustically—terrifically uninformative for the brain. Two fundamental intonation patterns are rising or falling pitch. In American English, relatively high or relatively low pitch at the end of an utterance, compared to the beginning and middle, seems to carry distinct meanings, as demonstrated by Janet Pierrehumbert and Julia Hirschberg.

Rising intonation can make any utterance sound like a question, whether it is one or not. In Sampling the Prosody of Sixteen Poets, we offer deformances of recordings of canonical and contemporary poets, including examples of changing the perceived biological gender of the poets and changing falling intonation patterns, the sound of declarative confidence, into uptalk, to investigate how much ideas of poetic authority and interpretation of a poem might be changed by such differences in vocal performance style.

The first two, Drift and Gentle, work together. These tools are currently undergoing further development thanks a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement grant for Tools for Listening to Text-in-Performance , with a team of 20 user-testers in the U.

Gentle , developed in by Robert Ochshorn and Max Hawkins, is a powerful forced aligner that lines up a given transcript with an audio recording, word by word. It can be downloaded for free and installed on Macs. Gentle is built on top of an open-source speech recognition toolkit developed at Johns Hopkins University, Kaldi , which uses modern neural network-based acoustic modeling, trained on thousands of hours of recorded telephone conversations.

Gentle can also produce a rough transcript of a vocal recording from scratch, which can then be corrected and aligned with the recording. This feature has great advantages in research on poetry recordings and other audio common in humanistic research, as transcripts for many recordings do not exist or are not easily accessible, in part because of copyright law.

In cases when Gentle could not recognize and calculate the duration of some words, either because of the quality of the recording or because the words were not in its lexicon e.

Such data may allow us to test some of insights and questions about the interplay between poetic form and prosody in performance. One thing we find in Sampling the Prosody of Sixteen Poets is that poets, whether they write formal or freer verse, exercise considerable latitude over whether they audibly pause at the line break, or let the syntactic momentum carry over into the next line without pausing.

It is a highly accurate pitch-tracker that also incorporates the forced alignment features of Gentle, visualizing a pitch trace over time and aligning it with a transcript. Ellis at Columbia University to work with precise accuracy on the noisy, low-quality vocal recordings common in the audio archive, Drift measures what human listeners perceive as vocal pitch the fundamental frequency, the vibration of the vocal cords, as measured in hertz every 10 milliseconds in a given recording.

Drift can also be downloaded and installed on a Mac; to function, it needs to be running on High Sierra system and Gentle must be opened first. The features allow the recording to be played from the text on the left by clicking on a word, or by moving the blue dot in the play bar at the top.

Here is the beginning of the CSV output for Drift, which works with Gentle to align the transcript with the pitch contour:. It can be downloaded and installing for free for academic use. It basically works by applying signal processing algorithms based on human auditory processing to create a rich model of a recorded voice, which can then be manipulated.

This one-minute movie walks through the basic steps, and this three-minute movie shows how to manipulate the different aspects of the Graphic User Interface, including f0 pitch , duration ratio , and so on. We are exploring it for future research. Rather than beginning the course with an overview of literary movements or the evolution of genres or literary forms, we would present students with sixteen poems, a sample of the varieties of poetic performance, with sample recordings of those poems recorded—the originals and deformances—and related data about pitch and timing in the original recordings, all to listen to and explore.

Assignments in close listening and analysis would engage students in questions about prosody-in-performance and poetic interpretation, questions about gender and poetic authority, and the topic of opening the canon to new voices and new forms.

Because of copyright we cannot include here the entire recordings of the poems, which are hyperlinked, but we do include the shorter recordings again, originals and deformances with each sample. When I got home and murmured these poems to myself, my pencil hovering over each syllable, I sometimes substituted in idiosyncratic stress patterns, influenced heavily by the region in which I learned to speak. When I submitted my answers, however, the quiz generated the three best guesses for the place from which I hail: 1 Chattanooga, TN my hometown!

At a writing conference a few years after my scansion assignment, the poet Tom Sleigh introduced to the workshop child psychologist D.

My childhood recitation of rites from the Book of Common Prayer in my Episcopal church likely has something to do with how I think about language, as does that country music radio my mother left on for me while I slept every night.