ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Digitizing Blake: The Sound and the Furor

Walter Ong’s discussion of aural versus visual learning has lingered in the forefront of my mind throughout the span of this class. While browsing the Romantic Circles MOO and The Blake Digital Text Project I found myself considering his notion of sound as a “unifying sense” within the context of these two sites. While it may be somewhat of an overstatement to say that the sites’ use of sound “unifies” the experience of the texts, it is certainly worth noting the element of harmony that sound brought to both the MOO and The Blake Digital Text Project.

Blake’s “Milton a Poem,” a.k.a. the Bard’s tale, which is presented both textually and orally in the Romantic Circles MOO, tells the tale of the beginning of time. Appearing in a popup window with a background resembling aged parchment or papyrus, the text’s appearance is reminiscent of a centuries-old handwritten transcription. As the lines of text scroll vertically up the window, a man’s voice accompanies the words, reading them with a dramatic intonation and sounding not unlike James Earl Jones. Blake’s color images periodically fade in and out as the lines progress up the page, illuminating specific passages or phrases. With so many visual stimuli occurring within a small (no more than 8 in. by 3 in.) window, a simultaneous oral interpretation of the text has the potential to overwhelm and/or to become a distraction from the text. Yet it does just the opposite. The speaker’s voice serves to bridge the vast chronological, technological, and ideological distance between a story about the world as it came into being and its arrangement in a popup window frame on a computer monitor. The words themselves allude to a time before the existence of man, yet upon hearing them we are reminded that without the most modern of man’s innovations, we would be unable to make them come alive in such a dynamic environment. As Ong claims, spoken words are “magic” because they are power driven, whereas the words or “things” on the page are, in a sense, dead. The events within the MOO support the notion of this “magic,” seen in the effects of the Bard’s song on Milton. After he “hears” the poem in the MOO, Milton is “inspired to go down to the mortal grounds of Albion to find his fairer half before the great harvest of mankind.” Had he simply read the text, would he have been so inspired? The series of actions in the MOO that are required to inspire him suggest not; there is no denying the force of the words on Milton, and the reader, as they are spoken, or as Ong says, “envelop the listener” and “place him in the center of an auditory world.” The key phrase here is “envelop the listener,” which the oral accompaniment undoubtedly achieves in a manner impossible by simply reading static words on a screen.

The effect of Blake’s ephemeral images in the popup window effect is less successful. The images appear only fleetingly, and as the text scrolls over them, pieces of one or the other are temporarily indiscernible. The emergence of the images reflects the rightful assumption that they are inherent to the text, yet they fade too quickly, and are clearly presented as the least significant element of the content. The issue could be resolved if the entire text with accompanying images appeared at once in a larger window, yet if this were the case the reader would naturally read ahead of the voice, arrive at the conclusion of the poem before the speaker, and ultimately miss out on the rich, “enveloping sensation” of hearing and reading the text simultaneously. And so the images of the text are somewhat sacrificed to its oral rendition. In other words, the technological innovation that allows for an alternative, enriching textual experience of “Milton a Poem” detracts from what may be construed as the author’s original intent.

The same could be said for the four song versions of “The Tyger” in the Blake Digital Text Project. Surprisingly, the songs appear to be the chief attraction of the page on which the image of the original text is posted. While the black and white image of the illuminated poem is low resolution, the page with the images of the song album covers is busy and colorful. The song versions themselves span musical genres: Britten’s has an operatic feel and is accompanied by dramatic piano crescendos; Brown’s country style is reminiscent of Johnny Cash, including a twanging fiddle; Coren’s throbs with the rhythms of rock and roll; and Forbes’s acoustic rendition has a “folksy” tone. The song list appears to the left of the poem, adjacent to an illegible clickable graphic that allows the user to show or hide the list. After clicking on the singer’s name, the audio file automatically launches if the user already has a media player installed. If not, I saw no instructions on that page or the home page as to where to find and download a media player. The quality of the sound files is adequate—I could understand the words and, as in the MOO, follow along as I was listening. The singers’ dramatically different styles enhanced my experience of the poem, causing me to consider which words or phrases they emphasized and why. In the end, listening to four musical versions impelled me to read the text four times, gaining a fresh insight with each song. The aural versions of the poem produced a harmony in my readings that was not simply musical; listening to the text through four different sound filters allowed me a deeper and more holistic sense of the piece.

Yet, the aesthetics of this version of “The Tyger” did little to engage me. In addition to the low quality image of the poem itself and the aforementioned peculiar show/hide button, the dark purple links contrast poorly with the black background and the overall use of page space is visually ineffective.

Considering the decades he spent studying art and engraving, I surmise that had Blake witnessed these digital renditions of his poems, he may not have been pleased with the sites’ treatment of his illuminations. But does it matter if Blake’s illuminations have been subjugated and overshadowed by the spoken version of the digital text? Is it the job of digital humanists to preserve author’s original intent? Or is to present a text that will “envelop the listener,” allowing him an encounter with the text that is more dynamic and potentially enriching than that of the “dead words” in the codex? The answer to each question is yes. I envision a time when we will have it all: a digital version of a codex-based text that will not only preserve the original in its entirety, but will launch the reader into a sensory encounter with the text that will transcend the flat page from which it was born. Until then, readers must cobble together varying digital and print versions of a text, creating their own “unifying sense” of a piece and ever mindful of what has been added or sacrificed in the digitization process.

Posted by Christina at May 5, 2004 05:55 PM