Stochastic verse
15 November 2004 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammerA long-promised post. As those who've explored Fluffy Stuff can testify, I'm fond of random processes. And heavens, but there's a metric elephant of randomizers on the 'Net. But what facinate me the most is random poetry — the way it can come close to almost making sense. I don't mean widgets that serve up a random pre-written poem, though those are fun to graze in their own right; I mean stochastic verse creators.
There's several ways to make them. One is Markov generators — which randomly produce output based on the word patterns of a input source, such as Emily Dickinson or adolescents; the result can sound eerily like an undiscovered, if incoherent, poem of the original. Or just feed it natural language, and out comes something ... odd. Still, reload any of these few times and eventually you'll find something vaguely evocative, leaving you with the feeling there is a meaning there, if you could just grasp it. ETA: In fact, some people are trying to do just that.
Another way is to fill not a lexical or syntactic template, but a formal one. This is easier with haiku, because computers can count syllables better than stress them, but even there, there's variations in effect. But there are also metrical poem creators, of varying quality. To put it mildly. This is best explained with something small, like this limerick: you can read it with regular meter, but not naturally, especially if there's a couple words of one beat in a row — in other words, despite the way it's typically taught, meter is not independent of syntax.
And then there's the mix-and-match tactics, like these sonnet or country song generators that toss prewritten lines into a rhyme pattern, or a Dickinson haiku generator. Yes, that last is strange. If not downright surreal.
---L.
There's several ways to make them. One is Markov generators — which randomly produce output based on the word patterns of a input source, such as Emily Dickinson or adolescents; the result can sound eerily like an undiscovered, if incoherent, poem of the original. Or just feed it natural language, and out comes something ... odd. Still, reload any of these few times and eventually you'll find something vaguely evocative, leaving you with the feeling there is a meaning there, if you could just grasp it. ETA: In fact, some people are trying to do just that.
Another way is to fill not a lexical or syntactic template, but a formal one. This is easier with haiku, because computers can count syllables better than stress them, but even there, there's variations in effect. But there are also metrical poem creators, of varying quality. To put it mildly. This is best explained with something small, like this limerick: you can read it with regular meter, but not naturally, especially if there's a couple words of one beat in a row — in other words, despite the way it's typically taught, meter is not independent of syntax.
And then there's the mix-and-match tactics, like these sonnet or country song generators that toss prewritten lines into a rhyme pattern, or a Dickinson haiku generator. Yes, that last is strange. If not downright surreal.
---L.
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Date: 15 November 2004 01:33 pm (UTC)Also, just figured out that ETA means edited to add.
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Date: 15 November 2004 03:45 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 20 November 2004 01:41 pm (UTC)The adolescent-poetry generator reminds me of a similar journal-entry generator I once saw somewhere. It grabbed pieces of webjournals (possibly even Livejournals) and ran them together into new entries. It was a little scary how much they sounded like a certain type of journal (stream-of-consciousness, confessional, quotidian).
Thanks for posting this!
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Date: 22 November 2004 02:36 pm (UTC)---L.
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Date: 22 November 2004 03:49 pm (UTC)