Writer and composer

Scientists have developed an algorithm for creating musical works based on literary texts

New York musician, programmer and artist Hannah Davis, together with Saif Mohammed, chief scientist at the National Research University of Canada, developed an algorithm that turns literary texts into musical works. This was reported by CNET .

The algorithm, called TransProse, does not directly convert words into music, but determines the overall mood of the piece. It uses a special dictionary from the National Research University of Canada, consisting of 14 thousand words, divided into eight basic emotions (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy and disgust) and two moods (positive and negative).

Most often, different emotions are clearly expressed in different words. For example, “delightful” and “delicious” convey joy, while “sullen” and “crying” express sadness, “cry” and “boiling” demonstrate anger, and so on. Saif Mohammed

When a novel is fed to TransProse, the program reads the text and finds words from the list. She breaks the work into four chronological parts and uses the most frequently used phrases to determine the overall tone of the book. For example, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness primarily expresses fear and sadness, while Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince primarily expresses trust and joy.

The tone and density of emotional words in the text are used to determine the key indicators of a musical work: tempo, notes, keys and octaves. Positive books play in major keys, and negative books play in minor keys. Happy books have a higher octave, while sad books sound low. The more words expressing emotions in the text, the more notes there are.

In addition, Mohammed and Hannah provide several examples of compositions based on novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

The authors of TransProse report on their official website that their project is still in its infancy, and they do not yet claim to create beautiful melodies. The first version of the algorithm tests whether it is possible to create a piece of music based on the text that conveys exactly the same emotions.

#Article #Cormack_McCarthy #Alice_in_Wonderland #Hannah_Davis #National_Research_University of Canada #Saif_Mohammed #TransProse #Road #Lewis_Carroll #Little_Prince #Antoine_de_Saint_Exupery