The Vocal Range of Movies

A Program for Gender Sonification

While the first experiments with sonifying character roles were done by manually splitting up a movie script and attributing tones to each character, we quickly looked for a way to automatize the process. For this purpose we have created a small prototype written in Python that takes care of the necessary steps.

The program allows a user to adjust sonification parameters, as well as whether the resulting sonification should be saved as .MID or .WAV. Generally, we found MIDI to be more useful as it can be modified in other programs to create more pleasant sounding sonifications.

To sonify a movie, the program needs a script of the movie - and more specifically a .FOUNTAIN script. Fountain is an open-source markup language for screenwriting. Unfortunately most movie scripts that can be found online (for example via The Internet Movie Script Database) are not stored in this file format. Instead of writing our own parsing routine, we have used Trelby, an open-source screenwriting program that can parse movie scripts and save them as .FOUNTAIN files.

We haven't had the time yet to create a self-standing application for Windows, Mac, or Linux, although we would like to change this soon. Until then we have uploaded our prototype on GitHub for those who would like to tinker with it.

Research has shown that male characters consistently outnumber female characters in contemporary movies

In 1985, American cartoonist Alison Bechdel created what has become known as the Bechdel test - a simple check that one of the characters in her cartoon described as her rule for whether she'd watch a movie. Originally intended as a comedic statement, the Bechdel test has become a quick measure of (un-)balanced gender representation in movies, or perhaps more accurately, in the movie industry as a whole. Since then, other tests, such as the Mako Mori test, have been proposed to deal with the problem that failing the Bechdel test is not necessarily a sign for a problematic gender representation.

In this project, we propose another, more experiential way of assessing gender representation in movies: gender sonification. Dialogue lines from the most dialogue-heavy character roles are turned into tones with the pitch representing the gender, and the volume indicating the amount of dialogue of a character. Parts of the movie in which there is no dialogue remain silent, which allows the resulting sonification to retain a sense of 'rhythm' that is present in the movie.

Gender sonification is less of a pass-or-fail test than it is a way to experience gender representation by listening to essentially a compacted version of the movie. This of course does not mean that a listener will get a feeling for how a character is depicted within the movie. Still, being able to listen to how balanced a sonified movie sounds offers an interesting perspective regarding gender representation. More than anything else, gender sonification is meant to be a starting point for discussion. A discussion that we hope will motivate audiences and film makers to think about the way how the gender of a character is used in the movies we enjoy.

"The Vocal Range of Movies" has been demoed at the ICEC 2015 Conference in Norway for the first time. The final publication is available at Springer; a pre-print version can be downloaded here.

Sonification Examples

Below we have uploaded a small sample selection of .FOUNTAIN, .MID, and .M4A files to get interested listeners started.

Contact Us

If you have any questions, suggestions, or comments, feel free to contact us using the button below. We are are also happy about contributions that can be added to the Sonification Example list above!