Or, to put it another way, Yaw Views Nubs Die Hit.
Have you ever put your hands on the keyboard and started typing, then discovered that your fingers were sitting on the wrong keys? If you’re a touch typist, probably — and for a moment it feels like the CIA has taken over your hands.
I was wondering what words or phrases could be accidentally typed that way and still remain words, so I wrote a quick script to go through the dictionary looking for combinations.
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I’ve continued to tinker with automatic song generation since I posted Nickelmatic as I had a nagging sense that it was shooting fish in a barrel. The project I was intending to follow it suddenly started behaving frighteningly like Scott Walker when I was expecting Gordon Lightfoot — hey, you never know what direction these things are going to take — but it also led me in a new direction that has temporarily taken precedence.
I was trying to solve this problem: how can I take the endless and semi-comprehensible-at-best output from a Markov text generation algorithm, and filter it down to a subset that could plausibly serve as lyrics? I started working with syllables and emphasis, which quickly led me to the Festival speech synthesizer. This is capable of dictating audible speech from any piece of text, along with all the disambiguation that entails. (It can also sing — but more on that later.)
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An acquaintance who shall remain nameless has actually admitted to liking Nickelback. Now, I’ll concede that mocking this band has become a populist move and I’d rather ride a bike than take a bandwagon — but as this famous video shows there is something worth targeting here: manufactured, bland, cookie-cutter production masquerading as anything expressive. (I played that video for the acquaintance and they didn’t even notice what was going on — “yup, that’s Nickelback.”)
Enough has been said on that particular soapbox. But this got me thinking: since the music is basically invariant between songs, including riffs, drums, solos, and chord progressions, is it only the lyrics that differ? Why not automate the process completely?
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Welcome to the new Cassettepunk. I’ve reluctantly replaced an earlier version of it that was conceptually beautiful — it was written in C for the 6502 processor and ran using a Javascript-based Commodore 64 emulator, thus making it the only web site ever to believe that it’s a C64 — but was just too awkward. This is one of the few times I’ll make a concession to practicality.
In addition to hosting a virtual portfolio of my projects, this website will inherit some of the energies I’ve been putting into the Free Geek Vancouver Volunteer Blog. I’ve had a lot of fun running that and will do my best to continue contributing, but I’m no longer able to volunteer at Free Geek on a weekly basis (I have a 7-month old daughter who also has claim to my time). I wish the days were longer but short of some potentially catastrophic celestial engineering that is not possible. Nevertheless I hope to stop in at Free Geek frequently… not least when my daughter is volunteering age.
My recent experiences participating in the East Side Culture Crawl have made clear to me the importance of carving out a clear identity for myself and the Free Geek Volunteer Blog is fairly muddied with my own projects. This one will have the same obsessions but more focused.
I have several projects on the go — a mixture of vehicular, audio/visual, nerdy, funny, impractical and potentially illegal — often using unloved old technology — so please drop this website into your feed reader and watch for more updates in the near future.
Best regards,
Alec Smecher
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