At 14:42 15/05/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>hehehe -- is that to say that you'd like to see a module that allows
>plug-n-play text->midi conversion? =)
Well.... yes!
>If so, would you be willing to work with me on it, to improve its
>flexibility?
Sure.
>TransMid is moving more and more towards a live performance
>tool, rather than one that deals with MIDI files. If the module were of
>that sort, it would be restricted to the Win32 platform.
Bum. We have a *nix MIDI and a WIn MIDI mod -- now to combine
the two. When I get my bloody MIDI gear here from the UK, I can do
that sorta thing; now I'm restricted to files, I'm afraid.
>I'd think that, from the start, the basic functionality would be :
>
>- define a delimiter to split input text on
>- define attributes of the input text (#elements, # words, # lines,
>#sentances, #punct, etc.)
I thought you'd done those bits?
>- define callbacks for volume, duration, note value and tempo
>- methods for
> - opening file / reading text from scalar
> - run transformation
> - get info / variables / attributes
> - write output
>
>Would it need to do much more?
No, but then that could keep many people going for a long time.
Well, the former bit: this last list looks easy enough doesn't it?
Run of the mill programming. But I'd like to have a look some
more: I read something of algorithms inserted at my leisure -
that sounds cool.
Currently, I take a piece of text, and split it into sentances.
These I split into comma- or (semi-)colon delimited phrases.
These I split into words. The words I split into syllables.
That's the easy bit.
What I want to do now two things:
1. Get a rhythm from a phrase (the title) and use it throughout.
Impossible without knowing where in a word the accent falls,
and there is no formula in English. But I have a plan, involving
the use of the apostrophes used in (good) dictionaries to mark
stress --- if it's not in my rhyming dictionary module then I'll
put together a module to read my OED CD-ROM.
2. Get some nice melodies. That's the bit that people spend PhDs
doing -- but I figure if I ignore the neural nets GA for now, and
just knock out some Jungle stuff. I don't like Jungle. (I do like
Squarepusher, so I'm not far off.)
3. I do not really want to get into "random" music; I don't
wanna use ASCII or UTF values in any way. I don't want to a very
rule-based approach: all that is done -- Bach did the latter, and
although it was OK, it's not really self-composing.
4. I am very interested in using phonemes, though: the pop of a 'p',
the slur of a sibilant ... that would be interesting when combined
with word-stress. Sadly, we might also need word-stress, which
requires either a very clever knowledge database (which no-one
seems to have yet, STILL), or some human input. So far, I'm
using the latter - taking my text as HTML, and using <I>, <EM>,
etc, as word-accent.
What do you think?
CC'd this to the lists, as they're very quiet.
lee
Lee Goddard, Budapest and London
perl -e "while(1){print rand>0.5?chr 47:chr 92}"
