Not All is Vanity

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The Hebrew paper "Not All is Vanity: Yossi Banay Reading Alterman" discusses the problems of rhythmical performance in a poem by Nathan Alterman, as read by Yossi Banay on HL6020. The CD is commercially available. This page presents the quotes from Alterman, the sound files of their perormance, and the graphic output of the speech analyser application for these sound files. In quote 6 it presents two lines from the poem with three alternative versions of Yossi Banay's performance. There is an extremely strained enjambment between the two lines of this quote. The paper claims that the performer may convey both the verse line and the run-on sentence as perceptual units by having recourse to conflicting phonetic cues: cues of continuity and discontinuity simultaneously. In his "published version" of quote 6, Yossi Banay had recourse only to cues of continuity, suppressing the verse line as a perceptual unit. In the two alternative versions these two lines were electronically manipulated, inserting cues of discontinuity. In the "first alternative version" the duration of the second [i] of bilti was more than doubled. Then, the two lines were presented to a group of graduate students as genuine versions of Yossi Banay's reading. They were asked whether any one of the two versions did convey simultaneously both the verse line and the run-on sentence as conflicting perceptual units. There was consensus that the "first alternative version" did. The "second alternative version" presents the first alternative version with two additional electronic manipulations: a glottal stop was copied from another verse line and pasted before afari; and, to render the manipulated lines more natural, a short section of the [i] of afari was excised, at the point where its pitch was the highest.

^{Listen to Yossi Banay's reading of the whole poem}

The whole poem

Listen to Yossi Banay's reading of quote 4.

ze lo tov

Listen to Yossi Banay's reading of quote 5.

lines 1-2

Listen to two versions of Yossi Banay's reading of Stanza IV.

genuine version

doctored version

Listen to Yossi Banay's readings of quote 6.

published version

first alternative version

second alternative version

Listen to Yossi Banay's reading of quote 7.

quote 7

Listen to Yossi Banay's reading of quote 8.

quote 8

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