Programming Etude #1: "Poets of Sound and Time"

Description

Experimental poetry written using ChucK with Word2Vec involving text, sound, and time. More info: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/wiki/356-winter-2023/etude1

Videos

Analogy Poem

Romeo and Juliet Mad Libs Poem

Code

Download Zip

Reflection

The first poem I worked on was the analogy poem. I came up with the idea after thinking about how you could generate similar analogies when given a starting analogy. As I was working on it, I realized that the analogies that the program was coming up with were sometimes really funny because it would come up with analogies that either didn’t make any sense or were strangely accurate. But I think it was most funny when I typed in an analogy that was more of an opinion than fact. For example, the following poem was generated after inputting “stanford stupid.”

stanford is stupid 

yale is dumb 

ucla is awful 

princeton is silly 

harvard is foolish 

rutgers is disgusting 

georgetown is ridiculous 

asu is idiotic 

 

"Analogy Poem"

If a human wrote this poem, I don’t think it would be that interesting or funny. However, I think what makes this poem funny is that you can tell people that an AI wrote it. While this program spitting this poem out does not make these statements factual, it almost feels like they are because the computer can’t have opinions and is performing vector arithmetic to generate this poem. 

After this realization, I worked on the Romeo and Juliet mad libs poem with the idea that an AI might come up with comical conclusions about the relationship between two people just from their names. For example, someone could type in the names of two people they know and discover from the poem that the program makes up whether those two people are enemies, exes, lovers, pals, or married. Again, this can’t possibly be fact, but it is funny to think about what the AI thinks the relationship is just based on names. It is also thrilling to see what the AI thinks, similar to how it might be fun to read a horoscope prediction or a fortune cookie fortune despite knowing that it is bogus. 

Acknowledgements

I used this website to inspire my romeo and juliet mad libs poem: https://www.madtakes.com/libs/186.html