They Do the Police in Different Voices: Computational Analysis of Digitized Performances of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

The SpokenWeb Podcast

T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land is arguably not a poem at all. To some readers and critics, it’s more like a play: a collection of voices thrown together without quotation marks or speaker tags. That’s how Eliot himself saw it; his working title was He Do the Police in Different Voices. The work comes alive in performance, where each reader must decide for themselves where one voice gives way to another, and what characterizes each voice. As a result, each reading is unique.

In this podcast, Adam Hammond asks if computers can help us to decide which readers are best at “doing” the voices in the poem. Looking at performances by such readers as Viggo Mortensen, Fiona Shaw, and Alec Guinness, and using tools such as Drift and Gentle, he asks whether Eliot’s own reading of the poem — dry, monotonous, and hopelessly formal to the human ear — might sound more interesting to a computational listener.

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Adam Hammond is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Far Shore: Indie Games, Superbrothers, and the Making of Jett (Coach House, 2021) and Literature in the Digital Age (Cambridge UP, 2016). His is editor of Cambridge Critical Concepts: Technology and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2023) and The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age (forthcoming, Cambridge UP, 2024). He co-edits the series Cambridge Elements of Digital Literary Studies. His work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Wired.

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Works Cited

Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Cultural Analytics 3.1 (2018): https://doi.org/10.22148/16.022