The Benshi Organ is a two-octave midi keyboard that allows the player to
compose genre-specific movie dialogue by simply "playing" the
instrument.  Two-octave keyboards have 25 keys (the top note being the third octave of C); and, because there's a rich corpus of free and readily accessible movie subtitle data on the web (.srt and .sub files), we wanted to tap into this text as source material for a new means of rapid composition. The Benshi Organ provides a physical interface to pull from and interleave the subtitles of 25 movies from five genres. The corpus was constructed by collecting the subtitle files from the "top 25" movies from five different genres -- action, comedy, horror, romantic comedy, and science fiction. We deferred our judgment as to which films made the cut in each genre to a (less-than authoritative) website found in a Google search. Scifi: 12 Monkeys 2001 Alien Aliens Blade Runner Brazil Close Encounters of the Third Kind ET Forbidden Planet Galaxy Quest Invasion of the Body Snatchers It Came From Outer Space Matrix Metropolis Planet of the Apes RoboCop Soylent Green Star Trek The Wrath of Khan Star Wars A New Hope Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back Terminator 2 Terminator The Day the Earth Stood Still The Thing Tron Action: Aliens Blade Runner Bourne Ultimatum Dark Knight Die Hard Enter the Dragon French Connection Gladiator Goldfinger Great Escape Hard Boiled Kill Bill Lethal Weapon Lord of the Rings Return of the King Matrix Raiders of the Lost Ark Rambo First Blood Road Warrior Seven Samuari Speed Spiderman 2 Star Wars Empire Strikes Back Terminator 2 Top Gun Wages of Fear Horror: Alien American Werewolf In Paris Audition Bambi Braindead.(Dead.Alive).-.Peter.Jackson.-.1992.-.English.-.DivX3.-.DVDrip.srt_clean Carrie Diabolique Frankenstein Freaks Gothika Halloween Invasion Of The Body Snatchers Jaws Leprechaun in The Hood Mask of Satan Men Behind The Sun Night of the Living Dead Nosferatu Peeping Tom Psycho Red Dragon Shaun Of The Dead Taxas Chainsaw Massacre The Exorcist The Fly Romantic Comedy: 40 Year Old Virgin Adams Rib Annie Hall Bridget Jones Diary Four Weddings and a Funeral Groundhog Day Harold and Maude His Girl Friday It Happened One Night Jerry Maguire Moonstruck Muriel's Wedding My Best Friend's Wedding Pretty Woman Roxanne Say Anything Sixteen Candles Some Like It Hot Something About Mary Something Wild The Philadelphia Story The Shop Around the Corner The Wedding Singer Tootsie When Harry Met Sally Comedy: 40 Year Old Virgin American Pie Animal House Bachelor Party Bad Santa Blazing Saddles Blues Brothers Borat Caddyshack Clerks Coming to America Fast Times at Ridgemont High Kentucky Fried Movie Knocked Up National Lampoon Christmas Vacation Old School Police Academy Slap Shot Something About Mary South Park Bigger Longer Uncut Stripes Superbad Team America World Police This Is Spinal Tap Wedding Crashers Selection of movie genres is dictated by five foot-switches, which operate in conjunction with a hacked volume pedal, which navigates the movies' timelines -- that is to say, anywhere in the movie from beginning to end (in the photo below, the pedal is set to "beginning-of-movie")  We're still resolving the best way to output scripts composed with the Organ and provide feedback to the writer. Currently, each line is printed to a UNIX-style terminal application, and simultaneously read aloud by Apple's text-to-speech engine. Subtitle data was of particular interest to us because it retains information about the timing and duration of each line. We wanted the interface to accommodate a non-linear progression through each movie's script, so we used this timing information in conjunction with the volume pedal to allow the writer to select where to pull text from in a movie's timeline. The writer presses down on the pedal to pull lines from later in the script, and lifts off of the pedal to move back towards the start of the script. It takes just a few lines of subtitle text before the transparency of a movie's genre begins to show through; and the 5-channel foot-switch gives the writer the option of sampling from specific genres at will. If, for example, they were inclined to add a pinch of romantic comedy to their sci-fi epic, a few lines of levity are easy to access with the foot-switch. Here is the code, here. |