We aim to create a curated database of EEG signal recorded from 50 participants (19 electrodes) while they listened to the same recorded recitation of a landmark European poetry collection (The Tower, by W. B. Yeats). This is an extensive database and we believe it would be unique in scope and focus, and which we hope to make available to all neuroscience/ neuroaesthetics/ literary and cultural studies researchers before the 2028 centenary anniversary of the first publication of the poetry collection.

EEG signal was collected from 50 participants while they heard the same recording of a recitation of the entire poetry collection, The Tower, in English (3,851.41 seconds, app. 64 mins). The EEG signal was collected from Romanian-English bilinguals (N=28, 9 male, 19 female, age 18-43, M=24.03, SD=6.51) as well as Romanian monolinguals who did not understand the words recited to them (N=22, 12 male, 10 female, age 18-60, M=27.57, SD=11.69). We have cleaned the signal for each channel for each participant. We now seek to isolate each line of verse in both the EEG stream and the sound envelope stream and publish these matched sequences along with line-by-line scansion (metric analysis).

The uniqueness of this database derives from the fact that it is the only EEG signal database in the world that offers clean signal corresponding to an entire poetry collection, thereby enabling humanists (who analyse cultural meanings based on evaluating cultural objects, such as a poetry volume, in their entirety, or on the whole) and neuroscientists (whose analyses are limited by equipment and processing constraints, but who are able to generalise from small sample analysis results) to work together in concrete, genuine interdisciplinary frameworks. The database would contain app. 60,800 minutes of EEG signal that is pre-cleaned by us and made ready for line-by-line analysis by any interested scholars in the international community.