Programming Etude #1: "Poets of Sound and Time"
Poem 1 - Project808
This program utilizes samples from the iconic Roland TR-808 drum machine, extensively used across various music genres. It combines these samples to create music, alongside generating an accompanying poem. This poem is rhythmically synced with the track, offering a cohesive blend of sound and spoken word while embracing the limitations and randomness of the word generator Word2Vec.
Inspiration: Roland 50 Studio
Poem 2 - a interactive stream of words
An interactive program captures sound through a microphone input and analyzes it in real-time. It utilizes FFT and Spectral Centroid to extract key audio characteristics. These numerical values are then transformed into a stream of words using Word2Vec, (occasionally forming coherent poems, when we get luck).
Reflection
Creating these two poems was similar to a challenging hike, full of struggles. As neither a music composer nor a programmer, it took me a while to brush up on some rusty skills to get things moving and to understand how Chuck works. For some reason, going into this project, I had a lot of faith in AI (to generate poems), especially after seeing how easy it was to make sound and how cool it sounded during our Chuck tutorial. However, when I actually tried to create coherent word structures and music loops, I realized that much more manual labor and creative thinking were required. One needs to break down measurements and bars and essentially write out the entire rhythm to create interesting music. The same goes for writing a poem. Creating a coherent sentence requires helpers and word banks that are separated into verbs, adjectives, etc. The more I tried to use Word2Vec to help me create sense-making text, the less sense it made.