Software for Poets (Was: Re: Text-to-speech)

[Charles Hartman]

On Mar 20, 2005, at 4:10 PM, Francis Girard wrote:

> Hello M. Hartman,
>
> It's a very big opportunity for me to find someone that both is a poet 
> and
> knows something about programming.
>
> First, please excuse my bad english ; I'm a french canadian.

My French is a great deal worse than your English; fear not.

>
> I am dreaming to write a software to help french poets to write strict
> rigourous classical poetry. Since calssical poetry is somewhat 
> mathematical,
> a lot of tasks can be automatised :
>
> 1- Counting the number of syllabs ("pied" in french) in a verse
>
> 2- Checking the rimes ; determining the strength of a rime
>
> 3- Checking compliance of a poem to a fixed pre-determined classical 
> form (in
> french, we have distique, tercet, quatrain, quintain, sixain, huitain,
> dizain, triolet, vilanelle, rondeau, rondel, ballade, chant royal, 
> sonnet,
> etc.)
>
> 4- Propose a synonym that will fit in a verse, i.e. with the right 
> amount of
> syllabs
>
> 5- Suggest a missing word or expression in a verse by applying the 
> Shannon
> text generation principle
>
> First, do you think it may be a useful tool ?

That is a very deep question. (See below.)

> What other features you think can make it usefull for a poet ?
>
> The first task of cutting sentences into syllabs (phonetically of 
> course, not
> typographically) is already done. It's been difficult to get it right 
> and to
> make it guess correctly with a very very high percentage.
>
> I can very well imagine that the next task is even more difficult. I 
> need to
> translate text into phonems. Do you know some software that does it ? 
> I guess
> that voice synthetisers that translates written text into spoken text 
> must
> first translate the text into phonems. Right ? Do you know if there 
> some way
> that I can re-use some sub-modules from these projects that will 
> translate
> text into phonems ?

The problems are hard ones. Getting reliable syllable divisions is, all 
by itself, a heart-breaker in English; I'm not sure whether harder or 
easier in French. (See the module syllables.py in the source code to my 
Scandroid program at the site listed below.)

Rhyme is harder -- I haven't yet tried it in English -- precisely 
because text-to-phoneme is very hard.

I haven't really worked with this, that is, with the sounds of speech 
(though I'm a musician as well as a poet), mostly because it's 
difficult. The projects in my *Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer 
Poetry"[1], for example, deal almost entirely with language as a 
typographical phenomenon. So does my Scandroid, even though the 
material it's working with is all aimed at and motivated by the 
auditory qualities of poetry.

I do imagine you're right that the text-to-speech people have worked 
out a lot of this. The trouble is that so far I haven't seen 
public-domain code for the guts of such a program, which is what you 
would need.

Interesting to think about which problems change between French and 
English and which do not.

Good luck -- keep me posted.

[1] This was published by Wesleyan Univ Press, what, nine years ago. 
Probably out of print. I do know where to get some copies.