What's that Scary Sound? Ambient Sound in Gothic Fiction

This paper presents an approach to operationalizing ambient sound as a literary phenomenon. To illustrate the importance of the ambient soundscape in literary studies, we both manually and automatically detect ambient sound markers and use these annotations to analyze a sample of nineteenth-century English novels and short stories. Our hypothesis is that descriptions of a story’s ambient soundscape can be associated with specific genres, and is, for example, a hallmark of Gothic novels. We use a classification approach based on a state-of-the-art transfer learning algorithm and a domain-dependent fine-tuned BERT model for English to automatically detect word-level sound indicators and compare their occurrence over the course of the fiction and with a comparative view on our corpus texts.