James Baldwin's 1965 Debate Speech at Cambridge Union - Prosodic–Musical-Rhetorical Analysis Dataset (v2.0)

This dataset contains prosodic, phonetic, musical, and rhetorical analysis of James Baldwin’s 1965 Cambridge Union debate speech on the motion “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro.” Generated using the Rhetoric Analysis Toolkit, the dataset integrates forced phonetic alignment (Montreal Forced Aligner), acoustic feature extraction (Praat via Parselmouth), AI-generated rhetorical scheme detection (OpenAI GPT-4o), and musicological representations (MIDI and MusicXML). This multimodal approach enables researchers to investigate how Baldwin’s vocal performance—pitch, timing, intensity, pacing, phrasing, and prosodic emphasis—interacts with classical rhetorical structures to construct one of the most influential speeches of the civil-rights era.

The dataset includes aligned audio and TextGrid files, detailed acoustic analyses at both word and phoneme levels, rhetorical-scheme annotations across all 38 segments of the speech (including anaphora, assonance, alliteration, homoioteleuton, isocolon, rhyme, and polysyndeton/asyndeton), and cross-segment patterns such as ploce and extended anaphora. Advanced pattern-specific analyses examine the recurring rhetorical force of key lexical anchors such as “dream,” “shock,” and “you,” providing formant trajectories (F1–F4), pitch contours, and spectral information. Musicological analyses translate prosodic movement into notated contours, MIDI sequences, and MusicXML files suitable for computational or artistic use.

This dataset is designed for scholars in digital humanities, rhetoric, African American studies, political communication, linguistics, musicology, and performance studies. It enables close investigation of how Baldwin’s acoustic delivery structures argument, intensifies affect, and produces the moral and political force for which this speech is known.