As poems are read out loud and listened to, they reveal their innate musical quality. When given sound by a human voice, the resonance, melody and rhythm of a poem are transformed into music. A physical voice reading aloud a certain poetic composition always re-projects and restructures constituting aspects of its distinctive poetic structure – as the enjambment and caesura. A vocal execution ofte
n shows the fractures between syntax and prosody, grammar and performance, making evident the variations within the published and the vocal version. A new relationship to the subject who is reading, listening and understanding it, is established and new questions arise related to interpretation and authorship. Phonodia collects and present recordings of poets’ voice reading their own composition. Moreover, Phonodia also offers visibility to materials of academic production in order to promote scholarly engagement with critical interpretation of recorded poetry. Phonodia aim to became an on-line archive for poetry and voice as well as a tool for literary research in this field. It focuses in particular on voice in relation to contemporary poetic language and it is part of Prof. Elide Pittarello’s project “Archivio delle voci di poeti (A viva voce)” at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in collaboration with Prof. Renzo Orsini at the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics. Phonodia hosts: 1) the written poems, 2) the voice of the authors reading out loud their compositions, 3) information, documents and other materials related to a specific text or performance.
