"textklang" - Towards a Multi-Modal Exploration Platform for German Poetry

We present the steps taken towards an exploration platform for a multi-modal corpus of German lyric poetry from the Romantic era developed in the project "textklang". This interdisciplinary project develops a mixed-methods approach for systematic investigations of the relationship between written text (here lyric poetry) and its potential and actual sonic realisation (in recitations and musical performances). The multi-modal "textklang" platform will be designed to technically and analytically combine three modalities: the poetic text, the audio signal of a recorded recitation and, at a later stage, music scores of a musical setting of a poem. The methodological workflow will enable scholars to develop hypotheses about the relationship between textual form and sonic/prosodic realisation based on theoretical considerations, text interpretation and evidence from recorded recitations. The full workflow will support hypothesis testing either through systematic corpus analysis alone or with additional contrastive perception experiments. For the experimental track, researchers will be enabled to manipulate prosodic parameters in (re-)synthesised variants of the original recordings. The focus of this paper is on the design of the base corpus and on tools for systematic exploration - placing special emphasis on our response to challenges stemming from multi-modality and the methodologically diverse interdisciplinary setup.