Using phonetic and speech analysis tools, this chapter hones in on the voice and paralinguistic elements of testimony (pauses, sighs, breathing, changes in inflection, expressivity, and performance). Attuned to the sonorous dimensions of testimony that are all-too-often ignored when we privilege interview transcripts, this chapter turns to the grain of the voice through an analysis of silence and speech, loudness and pitch, and cadence and rhythm. We demonstrate how both “close” and “distant” listening achieved through phonetic analysis can provide insights into trauma and human expression that cannot be found when the analysis remains solely on the semantic meaning of words in testimonial narratives.
1. Abraham Bomba’s poems
Poems by Abraham Bomba; sound analysis by Richard Wang and Todd Presner; translation from Yiddish by Todd Presner.
Abraham Bomba composed Nekome (“Revenge”) while in the Czestochowa ghetto (1943), and recited it during his 1996 English-language interview with the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. The sound analysis was done using Praat.
In the same interview, Bomba shared a second, untitled poem, also composed in Yiddish, describing the Nazi raids that sent him and his family to Treblinka:
Data Source: USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive
2. Variations in Vocal Intensity in Abraham Bomba’s USC Shoah Foundation VHA Testimony (1996)
Developed by Campbell Yamane and Todd Presner.
The two data visualizations show the overall variations in vocal intensity in Abraham Bomba’s USC Shoah Foundation VHA interview (1996). The top one plots the average audio output in terms of relative decibels over time. The audio was sampled for decibel level every 250 milliseconds and then plotted as averages at 15 second intervals. The bottom spectrogram shows decibel by color and the full frequency range of the audio over time (represented as minutes along the x-axis). The obvious low points that occur approximately every 30 minutes represent the pauses for six tape changes, as these recordings were done on 30-minute betacam tapes. The circled parts of the spectrograms indicate where Bomba recites the two Yiddish poems.
Data source: USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive
3. Emotion annotations in David Boder’s interviews
Developed by Anna Bonazzi
David Boder added thousands of manual annotations to his interview transcripts in order to indicate variations in languages, emotional content, or significant prosodic elements like pauses, silence, and higher or lower speech rate. We manually classified and grouped Boder’s annotations into categories concerning emotions, languages, and technical details. The image above shows the occurrence of silence, laughter, crying, hesitation, and other annotations of nonverbal cues in Boder’s interviews.
Data sources: Voices of the Holocaust (Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology) and David Boder, Topical Autobiographies (1957), UCLA Young Research Library Special Collections.
4. Audio clips from USC Shoah Foundation testimonies
Selected and analyzed by Richard Wang and Todd Presner.
Erika Jacoby
Robert Ness
Efraim Hoffman
These spectrograms, created using Praat, show vocal intensity as well as silences and hesitations in select clips of the testimonies of three Holocaust survivors: Erika Jacoby (July 11, 1994; Interview 8), Robert Ness (October 31, 1995; Interview 5388), and Efraim Hoffman (November 5, 1995; Interview 8351).
Data Sources: All audio files were provided by the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.