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Modernist Prosody – Reverse Engineering: On Kazimierz Wóycicki’s Experiment
Abstract
Using musical terminology, it can be written that this article is an étude, a small study in which I solve a minor problem of a technical/practical nature, rather than prove a thesis. This is a report on an attempt to reconstruct in living speech, the intonation of a 25-second fragment of Aleksander Swietochowski’s prose (one repeatedly complex sentence), which was written down in notes over 100 years ago by Kazimierz Wóycicki (Forma dźwiękowa prozy polskiej i wiersza polskiego, Warsaw 1912). This reconstruction consisted – strictly speaking – in modifying, with the help of “Praat” software, the pitch of the intonation of the previously recorded speech to that set in Wóycicki’s “score”. Before this could happen, however, a number of issues of a primarily musicological nature had to be resolved (consisting, roughly speaking, in a thorough understanding of the principles of modifying the musical signs that Wóycicki had introduced and in converting the microtonic values thus obtained into physical values [sound frequency]). The reconstruction effect may not be perfect, but cognitively and aesthetically intriguing. Moreover, it seems that far more interesting than the goal obtained was the path that led to it. It allows Wóycicki’s researchers to look at his work through the prism of new issues, especially those relating to the origins of microtonal music and the history of singing.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.