Voices of Spanish Poets: Vocal Archive and Experimental Study on Poetry Reading

Voices of Spanish Poets"" aims to present a first experimental study of Spanish poetry reading through the instruments of Digital Humanities.

The main goal of VSP is to store, enhance and explore the recorded voices of XX century and contemporary Spanish poets using an interdisciplinary approach. The relationship between text and reading is crucial for appreciating the deeper musical core of poetry.

Although it has been treated through mainly theoretical approaches, more recent international experimental studies, based on audio recordings, offer novel avenues of exploration which still require further development.

While poetry vocal archives constitute a major source of input for the main schools working on this issue, research dealing with Spanish poetry reading has not yet been carried out.

The VSP project fills this knowledge gap by means of its four main objectives: to create a dynamic digital platform for the study and listening of Spanish poetry reading; to conduct an Experimental Phonetic study on the VSP archive, developing a first History of Spanish poetry reading; to study poetry reading through an Experimental Psycholinguistic, Cognitive and Psychophysiologic approach, considering the perception and representation of the text through listening; to integrate these two last research approaches.

This proposal will combine qualitative, quantitative, and comparative approaches.

Based on innovative and interdisciplinary methods, VSP can make a great difference in the success and dissemination of the research field of poetry reading study. The VSP platform aims to be an important digital resource for listening and learning of poetry.

The integrated experimental studies can contribute to the improvement of performance and teaching strategies and innovate the approach to reading poetry.

The project is suited to further applications and can be the starting point for future collaborative research groups and wider multi-language projects.