“Literary Sound Studies: English 483 Class Anthology” is a student-created AVAnnotate project in collaboration with Sam Turner that compiles course projects into a public anthology. It focuses on how literature is performed and heard, using time-coded annotations to analyze voice, rhythm, silence, and audience in recordings of poems and performances. The variety is striking: students explore spoken-word (Sarah Kay & Phil Kaye), contemporary popular music (Taylor Swift’s “Seven”), modern and postwar poetry (Maya Angelou, Audre Lorde, Allen Ginsberg, Wilfred Owen), Indigenous and experimental work (Louise Bernice Halfe, Charles Bernstein), diasporic and sound-poetry pieces (Suheir Hammad, Michael Basinski), and studies of dysfluency (JJJJerome Ellis). What’s most compelling is how the interface’s filters and timestamped notes promote close listening as a collaborative scholarly practice—making technical features like caesura, timbre, pitch, and audience sound clear and accessible to a general, knowledgeable audience.
