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.
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