Assignment #4

Due at the beginning of session 08.

The digital cut-up revisited. In assignment #2, the tools available to you for cutting up and rearranging texts relied only on information present in the character data itself. Since then, we’ve learned several methods for incorporating outside information concerning syntax (i.e. with spaCy) and semantics (i.e., word vectors) into what we “know” about a text in question. Adapt your original digital cut-up assignment, making use of one of these new sources of information. What new aesthetic possibilities are made available if the unit of the cut-up can be a type of syntactic unit (instead of words, lines, characters), and if stretches of text can be algorithmically selected not at random, but based on their meaning?

What I Did

For this assignment I built off of all 3 past assignments to create a cutup tool for songwriting that outputs a song. As a part of this I also created a fictional band name generator for the song using Tracery. The below examples are from using parts of the following texts from Project Gutenberg:

GIST code with more notes

Song outputs:

Furrow by The Elsewhere Upholds

Key: Gb major

Lyrics:

Verse 1:
Concentrated hours
full thing
Stored the early morning hours
active power

Chorus:
Furrow

Verse 2:
Lower the early morning hours
soft organs
Following the morning
same modifications

Chorus:
Furrow

Verse 3:
Sing early in the day
same weeks
Return nine o'clock
such voices

Chorus:
Furrow
Stradella by The Boldly Called

Key: E minor

Lyrics:

Verse 1:
Developed one hour
previous royalties
Cavities the evening
exaggerated sound

Chorus:
Stradella

Verse 2:
Make who night
elastic form
Smiling ten or twelve hours
such appoggiatura

Chorus:
Stradella

Verse 3:
Have the morning
such power
Accomplish hours
Many paragraph

Chorus:
Stradella
Cinderella by The Faintly Did

Key: D minor

Lyrics:

Verse 1:
Die hours
rich dismay
Come evening
respected donations

Chorus:
Cinderella

Verse 2:
Drink fifty minutes
dead absence
Wrought hours
Laestrygonian PROJECT

Chorus:
Cinderella

Verse 3:
Kill fifty minutes
solemn armour
Astonished one hour
warm ends

Chorus:
Cinderella

---------

Ulysses by The Faintly Did

Key: C major

Lyrics:

Verse 1:
Hear night
own mankind
Given night
redoubtable business

Chorus:
Ulysses

Verse 2:
Do afternoon
good year
Think the tenth night
wet account

Chorus:
Ulysses

Verse 3:
Resist night
gleaming states
Questioning tomorrow morning
glad side

Chorus:
Ulysses

Libraries used: