Noise, Novels, Numbers. A Framework for Detecting and Categorizing Noise in D anish and N orwegian Literature (2024)

Abstract: We present a framework for detecting and categorizing noise in literary texts, demonstrated through its application to Danish and Norwegian literature from the late 19-th century. Noise, understood as “aberrant sonic behaviour,” is not only an auditory phenomenon but also a cultural construct tied to the processes of civilization and urbanization.We begin by utilizing topic modeling techniques to identify noise-related documents, followed by fine-tuning BERT-based language models trained on Danish and Norwegian texts to analyze a corpus of over 800 novels.We identify and track the prevalence of noise in these texts, offering insights into the literary perceptions of noise during the Scandinavian “Modern Breakthrough” period (1870-1899). Our contributions include the development of a comprehensive dataset annotated for noise-related segments and their categorization into human-made, non-human-made, and musical noises. This study illustrates the framework’s potential for enhancing the understanding of the relationship between noise and its literary representations, providing a deeper appreciation of the auditory elements in literary works, including as sources for cultural history.

## introduction noise, understood as "deviant sonic behaviour" @xcite , is an auditory phenomenon, but also a cultural construct, closely tied to processes of civilization and urbanization. the representation of noise in literature provides insight into the social and cultural developments of the period(s) in which that literature was written. but can we trace how the past may have sounded? in studies of literature and sound, the empirical foundation is often a small selection of texts, representing either canonical and/or avantgarde instances of 20 th century modernism (e.g., @xcite @xcite . in our investigations of the soundscapes in the literature of the scandinavian "modern breakthrough" (1870-1899), we broaden the empirical and cultural scope by reading at scale. for that, we develop a framework for the detection and categorization of noise in literary texts. we extract a series of noise-related topics from a corpus containing more than 800 danish and norwegian novels. by examining changes in the frequency of these topics, we draw insight into how literary perceptions of noise have evolved. the findings of this study contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between noise and its various representations in literary contexts, and specifically, how 'loud' the literary past was. contributions. our contributions are: (1) the development of a robust and scalable framework for detecting and categorizing noise in literary texts using fine-tuned language models and topic models; (2) the creation of an annotated dataset derived from over 800 danish and norwegian novels from the late 19 th century, with detailed classifications of noise-related segments into human-made, nonhuman made, and musical noises; (3) the implementation of analysis to track the evolution of noise perceptions in literature over time, reflecting the cultural and social changes in the soundscapes of the scandinavian 'modern breakthrough'; and (4) a demonstration of the framework's applicability and effectiveness in literary studies, paving the way for future research in other linguistic and cultural contexts. the code and datasets are available under this link: https://github.com/mime-memo/noise . noise/sound in literary texts. a strand of inquiry close to our empirical approach focuses on the representation of sounds and their associated soundscapes within historical and fictional worlds. @xcite pioneers this approach by examining evolving soundscapes, both real-world and fictional, emphasizing the role of writers as "earwitnesses" to past sonic environments. recent studies extend this exploration to fictional soundscapes, exploring how descriptions of ambient sounds contribute to immersive storytelling experiences @xcite . further investigations explore specific genres, such as gothic fiction, to uncover how ambient soundscapes shape narrative atmospheres and reader perceptions @xcite . fine-tuned bert models successfully detect and analyze word-level sound indicators across literary texts. this interdisciplinary approach not only enhances our understanding of sound's role in genre classification but also sheds light on broader narrative techniques and reader engagement strategies. ## scandinavian literary soundscapes studies in sensory history, and particularly soundscape studies, stress the importance of the sonic environments in which people live and operate. the importance of these soundscapes is based on the premise that the sounds one hears in a given place are as distinctive and as important as the things one sees there @xcite . 19 th century urbanized settings presaged a 'sound revolution,' where novel individual sounds and soundscapes rapidly emerged due to new industries, machinery, means of transportation, road surfaces, and the like @xcite . simultaneously a fundamental shift in people's relationship with sound and noise took place, leading some scholars to characterize the 19 th and early 20 th centuries as a particular auscultative age-an era devoted to sonic experiences, to 'close listening' and to auscultation "not only in the medical sense initiated by the stethoscope [. . . ] and perfected by the microphone [. . . ] but also in the sense of careful listening to a world at large." @xcite . in a scandinavian context, these sensory events are related to the "modern breakthrough." copenhagen changed radically during this time, with an an explosion in its population, and the introduction of new technologies and infrastructures. as parby (2021) has shown, these developments led to the emergence of new soundscapes, which were then incorporated into contemporary fiction. simultaneously, authors developed new realist literary techniques to give a fuller account of the material world and to represent it with verisimilitude and detail @xcite . ## defining noise in sound studies, the definition and phenomenological demarcation of noise has been a point of considerable discussion. etymologically, the word 'noise' is rooted in latin 'nausea' that encompasses seasickness and nausea, and refers to sounds that are perceived as excessive, incoherent, confused, or twisted. one of the founders of sound stud-ies, raymond murray schafer, proposed a clear dichotomy between natural and man-made noises from, for instance, industrial activity and traffic @xcite . this position has later been criticized for being a far too normative and rigid division, where man-made noise almost by definition is perceived as negative and natural sound events such as thunder claps as positive @xcite . some more subject-sensitive, less normative and, not least, operational definitions, which we rely on, have been suggested by david novak who defines noise as "deviant sonic behaviour" @xcite , and peter bailey who defines it as 'sound out of place' paraphrasing anthropologist mary douglas' classic definition of dirt as 'matter out of place' @xcite . in order to develop an operational conceptual framework, we use a very basic definition of noise as "silence-breaking"; this characterization means that noise can include moderate sounds such as whispering or mumbling voices as long as they are noted as sonic events in the text. it also means that we include neutral sonic phenomena, such as this description of factory whistles: the steam pipes sounded from all the factories, it was 8 o'clock. and i had to leave. (transl.) the quote says nothing about whether the whistles are perceived as noise by the character or narrator. but, obviously, the sound distinctively breaks a silence. based on our knowledge of industrialization and urbanization, as discussed in international sound studies research and reflected in literary sources, our hypothesis in the following is that during the latter part 19 th century the general noise levels increased, correlated with an increasing sensitivity towards noise, in a development more and more dominated by non-human noise sources. ## experiments and results in this section, we describe the selection of pretrained language models as well as the classification experiments on the noise detection and noise categorization datasets. ## diachronic analysis of noise segments having trained accurate noise detection and categorization classifiers, we use the best ones (dan-skbert fine-tuned on the two tasks respectively) to predict labels for all segments in the entire memo corpus. we then quantify the frequency of the occurrence of noise over time in the corpus, as well as the distribution of the different categories. ## conclusion we presented a framework for detecting and categorizing noise in literary texts and demonstrated its usefulness in the memo corpus. using topic modeling and fine-tuned bert-based models, we extracted and analyzed relevant text segments, providing new insights into the cultural and social transformations reflected in the soundscapes of the scandinavian "modern breakthrough" period. our study demonstrates that literary perceptions of noise can be effectively tracked and categorized, revealing significant patterns and trends. we have been able to add new perspectives on the interplay between literature and cultural history -and to empirically underpin hypotheses of the 19 th century as a particular auscultative era. future work will extend this framework to explore the impact of industrialization, examining how technological advancements and urbanization influenced literary soundscapes. we will also investigate the spatial dimensions of noise, contrasting rural and urban settings. further, we would like to do comparative analysis on other datasets to situate our study in a broader context, such as contemporary civil complaints (as documented in the city archives), and/or a corpus of modern danish novels (from the world literature data collective). additionally, we plan to analyze the lexical diversity in the terms used to portray noise, to get a better understanding of the psychological and cognitive aspects of the increased awareness of noise in the early phases of urbanization and industrialization.