Poemes and Phonemes by Kyle McDonald

Mar 29, 2008 at 4:47 PM
7 comments

Poemes and Phonemes on Vimeo

Phonologically driven generative poetry, explored as a response to the standard orthographically driven electronic poetry (and its precursors: Oulipo, Dada).

A genetic algorithm operates on "Poemes" made up of lines. The goal for this instance is to maximize the consonance and assonance of adjacent consonants and vowels, respectively. A new poem-population is created every 200 generations.

The visualization shows the movement of the poem over time in an approximate consonant space (blue) and vowel space (orange).

English language information drawn from the Moby Project. Built with Processing in Eclipse. For more information about classification of speech sounds, one place to start is the Wikipedia article on the International Phonetic Alphabet.

via Kyle McDonald
More of his work can be found here.

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[this is good]

This is really interesting, Chris. You find the wildest things! How did you find this?

Reckon replied to Renee/ the p.r.’s comment:
Mar 29, 2008
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[this is good]

Thanks, Renee! This one arrived in two spots: RSS feeds (I'm very far behind), and Arts & Letters Daily (I think). I've enjoyed Kyle's processing videos for some time via Vimeo. Amazing what can be...

lots of words had same phonems ,It 's just an organisation . yess ?

I am really glad to see other people posting, discussing, opening the possibility of poetry, that doesn't quite look/feel/sound like the poetry we 'expect'. I hope such influences will find their way into even 'traditional' poet-speak ;)

[this is good]

This is very interesting. Thank you for sharing this, you do find the wildest things!!!

[this is good]

Thanks, eightangel! I'd say it depends on the context & algorithm but yes: an exceedingly chaotic, painstakingly organized organism (living) the likes of which we can only hope to grasp in brief moments of lucidity, usually when least expected and always fleeting and fumbling in trying to explain it. By the time we do It has re-created and re-associated itself anew.

I'd love to build similar visualizations with Processing like this, but know little about it. Love this line: A new poem-population is created every 200 generations.

Concerning the viral, I always find it interesting how quickly a word can traverse the planet compared to a person...

[this is good]

Thank you, Fiona! I wholeheartedly agree and am confident it will seep through and sink in eventually. Considering where things stood just a few years ago, I'd say we're getting there. I'm hopeful.

Poemes and Phonemes by Kyle McDonald

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