One thing I've learned repeatedly, especially working in a public institution, is that success almost always arises from constraint. Artists have known this for a long time: say, a sculpture begins with a certain amount of stone; not only is that the total amount of material available, but the finished product will, by definition, become … Continue reading Constraint and Creativity
I've been playing around a bit with setting poetry to music, especially canonical works that incorporate rhyme or rhythm in a way that offer themselves as being more friendly to the definition of "song" in a pop sense. There are poems rendered here that you will recognize pretty easily: "Prufrock," "Stopping by Woods on a … Continue reading Canonical Dance Party
A lot of change in my life right now (mostly good but definitely bittersweet), and I will need to retrain my mind to move outside of daily processes, positions, and pathways that have been absolutlely necessary for nearly six years. Put another way, changing current habits is hard. Remembering some cherished habits of old, while … Continue reading Poetry can be Music, with even more Music
You know the drill. Here is an AI-inflected remix of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Just click on the title of this post and shazam, the audio player will become visible. Midjourney rendering of Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" "Get Out, Get Out Robert Frost" via GargageBand, via murph.ai, … Continue reading Get Out, Get Out Robert Frost!
I took an old poem of mine, "Liketown," and imported some complete stanzas and other reworked phrases into MURF.AI to act as pre-chorus and chorus elements (the verses are original stanzas). The voice I selected was dubbed "Terrell," who is described vocally as a "middle-aged male." My favorite voice on murf.ai In GarageBand I tried … Continue reading Another AI & Tech Experiment
I'll keep this one short. I have always loved the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. Everyone knows her most famous poem: We Real Cool The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon. … Continue reading We Real Cool (with Music)
Here is another mix (pun intended!) of AI and digital experimentation. First, I pasted my poem "acoustic shadows" into a basic text editor. Here is the poem's full text: Acoustic Shadows When Grant squeezed Vicksburg the siege outlasted trees, the Mississippi men burrowed into bluffs, even the river itself. Spectators huddled on the hilltops, Sunday … Continue reading Acoustic Shadows (plus music)
As I continue to play with AI-generated images, text, and voice I thought I would put my own work to the test. Spoiler: the bot is better than me. The experiment: I took the first half or so of my poem "Argus" (full original reprinted below) and dropped as much as was allowed into Writesonic, … Continue reading When the Bot is Just Better
Since I am playing with AI interfaces and algorithms, I figured why not add some AI-generated text and poetry to the mix? Once again using William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" as a prompt, I asked Writesonic to generate song lyrics using the poem's text as the first verse. The result is below, with my … Continue reading The Platinum Hit Wheelbarrow
