Abstract

This article outlines Drift, a pitch-tracking software prototyped in 2016 by Robert Ochshorn and Max Hawkins. Drift measures what human listeners perceive as vocal pitch (the fundamental frequency, the vibration of the vocal cords, as measured in hertz) every 10 milliseconds in a given recording, visualizing it in an easy-to-read, horizontally scrolling pitch trace, aligned with the text being read. Author Sarah Yuniar discusses how Drift can be mobilized in order to bring interpretability to oral literature.