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

In this assignment, we look into generating poetry synchronized with music using Word2Vec from a library of words, and various tools in ChucK. In particular, we are tasked with generating two poems, where each should be as different as possible. The full assignment details are available here.

All ChucK code for both poems is available in the above link.

For this assignment, I wanted to explore the concept of sleep through poetry and music, in particular the process of falling asleep and waking up. For the first poem "Lullaby Overthoughts," I was reflecting on how falling asleep can be hard as an overthinker. For this poem, I experimented with using sinusoidal oscillators to create two melodies layered to create a kind of lullaby sound, and then started with the phrase "good night." As the melody plays, I used word2vec to take the last word (i.e. "night"), and then generate a word similar to it, and then use that word to begin the next line, etc. I chose this structure because it mimics how I often think about one thing, then that leads to thinking about something similar but random, and this can lead to an overthinking spiral where the thoughts are somewhat connected but mostly disjointed. I experimented with the notes of the melody to make it sound calm, but also a little bit more rushed and spooky than a typical lullaby to evoke the feeling of overthinking. For my second poem "Rude Awakening." I was inspired by how when you wake up, the day often starts out calm, but then you start thinking about all the things you have to do which can be disorienting. I used sound to play frequencies that match the length of the words and the time elapsed so far. In doing so, the start of the poem beings pretty calm, but then slowly devolves as you make your TODO list for the day. It starts with typical things you think of and write down, and then becomes progressively generated by word2vec similar to how we as people often start remembering random things we have to do that we didn't plan for. A friend of mine said that unlike the first poem, there was very little structure but the increasing pace of the poem made him feel immersed in the hectic feeling of starting his day and like he was running out of time. Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment and found that the unpredictability of word2vec kind of worked in favor of the chaos of both poems. 

I reference several of the SinOsc ChucK tutorials on Github for writing these poems, such as this one.