Sonification of Edoardo Sanguineti's Poems

Edoardo Sanguineti’s poems are characterized by a very idiosyncratic style, which includes not only aural but also visual features, as poems show peculiar structures, sound repetitions, extra- and multi- alphabetical components, and multilingualism. The paper introduces a sonification sys- tem that allows the parallel display of these stylistic as- pects. After identifying a corpus of 20 poems representa- tive of the aforementioned features, a preliminary design step (which includes scenario analysis, task analysis and data analysis) has led to a sonification scheme in which each single character is associated with a sound, in partic- ular an earcon. In the sonification algorithm, the text is processed linearly and values for sound parameters are re- trieved for each character so to generate an earcon stream based on different synthesis techniques. We discuss imple- mentation in SuperCollider and introduce a graphical inter- face, which enables playback management and parameter control, so that the features of each poem can be explored interactively