Antonio Medina Perez
MUSIC 356 / CS 470
Programming Etude #1: "Poets of Sound and Time"
In this programming etude, I was to write two programs using chuck with Word2Vec to help me create some experimental poetry involving text, sound, and time.
Reflection
As someone who isn’t proficient or experienced in poetry in general, I found this assignment forcing me to ask questions of what is poetry? And why is it considered an art form in the first place? I found myself often spending more time contemplating that question, of what kind of poem I should make or try to generate, than actually generating anything. It wasn’t until I started to just generate for fun and out of curiosity that I actually started to loosen my own expectations for what poetry - and art - is and could be. In the end, I decided that art is anything that made me feel - anything that made me question my own expectations of what is normal or mundane. It was the unexpected, sentences such as “I have the construction for hate” that made me shudder, or “you could be my finally”, that made me go “aw” that really forced me to question the notion that art needs to be made by humans to be art. Maybe it can be made my anything, from people to nature to AI, but it’s how it makes us feel that is important in the end. Will I be using my Cyrano de Bergewhack love letter generator on dating apps any time soon? Maybe not in its entirety, but hey, some of those lines aren’t completely out of the question.
(use this one for in-class performance, file below video)
Poem #1: Sonic Love Letter Generator - a Cyr(AI)no de Bergerac (more like Bergewhack)
Need some help woo-ing that special someone?
Experimental sonic generated poem #2: Wonder
4 stanzas exploring what we as people have the capacity for - wonder, to start . . . .