Software for Poets (Was: Re: Text-to-speech)

[Francis Girard]

Hello M. Hartman,

It's a very big opportunity for me to find someone that both is a poet and
knows something about programming.

First, please excuse my bad english ; I'm a french canadian.

I am dreaming to write a software to help french poets to write strict
rigourous classical poetry. Since calssical poetry is somewhat mathematical,
a lot of tasks can be automatised :

1- Counting the number of syllabs ("pied" in french) in a verse

2- Checking the rimes ; determining the strength of a rime

3- Checking compliance of a poem to a fixed pre-determined classical form (in
french, we have distique, tercet, quatrain, quintain, sixain, huitain,
dizain, triolet, vilanelle, rondeau, rondel, ballade, chant royal, sonnet,
etc.)

4- Propose a synonym that will fit in a verse, i.e. with the right amount of
syllabs

5- Suggest a missing word or expression in a verse by applying the Shannon
text generation principle

First, do you think it may be a useful tool ?
What other features you think can make it usefull for a poet ?

The first task of cutting sentences into syllabs (phonetically of course, not
typographically) is already done. It's been difficult to get it right and to
make it guess correctly with a very very high percentage.

I can very well imagine that the next task is even more difficult. I need to
translate text into phonems. Do you know some software that does it ? I guess
that voice synthetisers that translates written text into spoken text must
first translate the text into phonems. Right ? Do you know if there some way
that I can re-use some sub-modules from these projects that will translate
text into phonems ?

Regards,

Francis Girard

Le dimanche 20 Mars 2005 04:40, Charles Hartman a écrit :

 

[Paul Rubin]

4- Propose a synonym that will fit in a verse, i.e. with the right amount of
syllabs

5- Suggest a missing word or expression in a verse by applying the Shannon
text generation principle
...
First, do you think it may be a useful tool ?
What other features you think can make it usefull for a poet ?

I'm skeptical of this notion. You can think of writing a poem as
building up a tree structure where there's a root idea you're trying
to express, "branches" in the choices of images/comparisons/etc. that
you use to express the idea, and "leaves" that are the actual words in
the poem. Rhyme means that a left-to-right traversal of the leaves
(i.e. reading the words) results in a pattern with a certain
structure. You're proposing a tool that helps explore the search
space in the nodes near the bottom level of the tree, to find words
with the right characteristics.

I think the constraint of rhyme and meter is best served by widening
the search space at the upper levels of the tree and not the lower
levels. That is, if you've got an image and you don't find rhyming
words for it with easy natural diction, a computerized search for more
and more obscure words to express that image in rhyme is the last
thing you want. Rather, you want to discard the image and choose a
different one to express the idea. That means seeking more images by
mentally revisiting and staying inside the emotion at the center of
poem, a much more difficult thing to do than solving the mere math
problem of finding a string of rhyming words with similar semantics to
a non-rhyming sequence that you already have. But when you find the
right image, the words and rhythm fall into place without additional
effort.

This is why writing good poems is hard, and is also why the results of
doing it well is powerful. I don't think it can be programmed into a
computer using any current notions.

 

[Francis Girard]

This is about poetry. I think the next reply should be done privately unless
someone else is interested in it.

Hi,

Le dimanche 20 Mars 2005 23:04, Paul Rubin a écrit :

I'm skeptical of this notion. You can think of writing a poem as
building up a tree structure where there's a root idea you're trying
to express, "branches" in the choices of images/comparisons/etc. that
you use to express the idea, and "leaves" that are the actual words in
the poem. Rhyme means that a left-to-right traversal of the leaves
(i.e. reading the words) results in a pattern with a certain
structure. You're proposing a tool that helps explore the search
space in the nodes near the bottom level of the tree, to find words
with the right characteristics.

I think the constraint of rhyme and meter is best served by widening
the search space at the upper levels of the tree and not the lower
levels. That is, if you've got an image and you don't find rhyming
words for it with easy natural diction, a computerized search for more
and more obscure words to express that image in rhyme is the last
thing you want.

Absolutly right.

Rather, you want to discard the image and choose a
different one to express the idea. That means seeking more images by
mentally revisiting and staying inside the emotion at the center of
poem, a much more difficult thing to do than solving the mere math
problem of finding a string of rhyming words with similar semantics to
a non-rhyming sequence that you already have.

Again, right. Your description comes very close to my own experience of
writing poems and I never read something as clear as what I'm reading here.
Poetry practice is described most of the time in poetic terms just like
religion is described in religious terms. And one has to impregnate himself
with these words to, little by little, gain some understanding of it. Your
description proves that it is possible to describe it otherwise. I am truly
marvelled.

The question is : how do you discard the image to choose another one ? How
this process takes place ? I observed myself while writing a poem (I, myself,
may not be good example since I am certainly not a good poet) and discovered
that it is while playing with the words, trying to find the right one, with
the right number of syllabs, that I discover a new image, and re-write the
whole verse, even re-arranging the whole strophe or poem. My goal with the
two last tasks (4 and 5) was to help the poor guy struggling with the words,
not to produce the correct final verse, but only to help him in one of the
phase of his writing.

But when you find the
right image, the words and rhythm fall into place without additional
effort.

I don't believe much in this. Poetry and writing in general is work, work,
work and more work.

This is why writing good poems is hard, and is also why the results of
doing it well is powerful. I don't think it can be programmed into a
computer using any current notions.

Again right. My goal, of course, is not to substitute the poet by a computer.
Only help him in some of his mechanical tasks.

Regards

Francis Girard