Speaker
Description
The project Sound and Meaning is currently elaborating a large, annotated database about the Spanish Golden Age theatre. The main aim of this project is to determine which relations can be established between metrics, rhythms, and the semantics of the play. Are there rhythms that seem to suit better a comedy rather than a tragedy? Do the different playwrights have rhythmical fingerprints, similar to the authorial marks that can be detected by stylo (R) counting the most frequent words (MFW)?
This contribution will offer a first insight into the structure of the database and the programs to present and display the data we are currently collecting. Using Python and pandas we will demonstrate the new results this project is generating. Since the method of the MFW in packages like stylo (R) is well established and accepted in the community, we will show that the statistical analysis of the most frequent rhythms can generate similar results. Rhythm is therefore a distinguishable characteristic of the different authors of the seventeenth century. Furthermore, we will show differences between the literary genres of the comedia nueva and their rhythms. This contribution will therefore present new programs for the metrical analysis and first results of the statistic evaluation of the data.
