Sound and Meaning in Spanish Golden Age Literature

What can the mere sound of spoken words evoke? What do Spanish Golden Age poetry and theatre actually sound like? How are sound and sense associations used in poetry and theatre? Recent investigation in neurolinguistics has revealed surprisingly common and stable associations between sounds and feelings, movements and even shape, to the degree that chance can be excluded in explaining this phenomenon. At present, literary criticism often ignores the acoustic materiality of texts. Nevertheless, the applicants recent studies were able to show that precisely Spanish baroque poets and playwrights used these associations between sound and sense to strengthen their texts. These sound effects may either affect the recipients in a very direct way or serve to elaborate a highly complex conceptual use. The deep abysms Calderns characters go through are often created by sonic spheres, caused by rhyme structures and rhythm, that use and stress precisely the dark vowels, such as u or o, to put just one example. The applicants present project showed that, in particular, Spanish romances and its assonances are very likely to function in this manner. Its monorhyme repeated at every second verse line is able to create specific tunes for different scenes. Nevertheless, the semantic use of the romances rhyme structure has barely been studied. Considering the sixteenth and seventeenth concepts of world harmony and the importance of hearing for religious purposes, this is particularly surprising. Therefore, this project aims to answer these questions: Where and in which contexts does this conceptual use and semantization of sound structures occur? For what purposes were these sound structures thought? To this end, this project combines literary history and literary criticism under the perspective of current neurolinguistic, Sound Studies and digital humanities. The elaboration of new open-source programs and databases for sonic aspects will be necessary to study the vast corpus from the medieval romancero viejo, the romance nuevo (Lope, Gngora and Quevedo) and the romances used on stage by Lope, Caldern and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The analysis of sound structures and their functions in baroque texts, using digital humanities and considering neurolinguistic aspects, will offer a new and fundamental perspective on Spanish Golden Age literature as well as on literary texts in general.

The Sound and Meaning project has developed a new type of stylometry. The research question was whether rhythmic peculiarities in Spanish Baroque theater have authorship character. For this, a program for automated metric analysis had to be written first, and a sufficiently large corpus of rhythmically notated plays had to be created. This was the first phase of the project. Approximately 500 pieces were analyzed rhythmically in this way. The evaluation showed that the rhythm of the Spanish 8-syllable line indeed offers a signal of authorship.