DARK SAGAS

41 Icelandic sagas — Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar and Brennu-Njáls saga at first visit — read for their feelings: 547 windows around cue words, by eye and by ear.

Every dot is a site: a window of text around one of 38 cue words for a feeling, found in 999,286 words of saga prose. The views place the sites by the meaning of their words (UMAP, a self-organising map, t-SNE), by their grammar (PCA), along the narrative arc of each saga, and as concordance lines (KWIC). The colour is the feeling's field: anger, body, fear, grief, laughter, shame_honor, silence, tears. The subtitles at the bottom show the words of the selected site.

The sound starts at your first click or key press. Click a dot to hear its site; the arrow keys walk the sites in narrative order. Type a word to light the sites near it in meaning; press Enter to walk every site of a word through the sagas (level 1) and Escape to come back. Press L for the perceptual legend: hold a chip to hear one driver alone, one layer alone, or the current site. Headphones help.

Credits

Data

Sound and method

Every site is a window of text around a cue word for a feeling (anger, fear, grief, laughter, shame and honour, silence, tears, the body). What the window does — who speaks, how much is negated or understated, how many people feel in it, where in the saga it falls, how close it is to the word you asked for — becomes sixteen numbers, and those numbers shape one continuous sound: a low bed that never stops, a pad coloured by the feeling, a whisper for speech, a short blip when someone feels, a glide when a query lands, and a step for every site of a word's journey through the text. Each feeling has its own signature: anger is a rough, saturated bite; grief a dark, slow falling sigh; fear a shivering flutter; laughter bright staccato plinks; shame and honour a grave fifth below the root; silence opens gaps in the bed; tears are the darkest contour, a weeping line; the body an inharmonic swell, pressure rising.

Sound engine

The sound is made by SuperCollider running inside this page: its synthesis server (scsynth) and its language (sclang), compiled to WebAssembly.

Software and licences

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