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of their their other one of of some some of rightful the considered the rightful property of some universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession be in feelings the a good fortune, must be little possession of a good fortune, must fortune, must be a possession of a good truth truth this this truth is so so well fixed in the of the the truth is this considered considered the is the rightful property of some one or other It is a truth universally man the feelings or the little universally single a neighbourhood, a views good However However possession possession good of such of of such of or the known the want of a wife. views views or feelings in wife. However little little known the feelings

The source text is, again, Pride and Prejudice. The colors correspond to the level of accuracy with which I hit the “beat” that produced each word (this obviously needs to be improved to make the relationship more intuitive). A screenshot of the Semantic Anomalizer plus the Processing applet I’m using as a prototype for the drum can be found after the jump.


(click for larger version)

For my Living Art midterm project, I’m building an audio version of the Text Drum, a device I’m building for my thesis. Here’s how it works: you “play” a series of words from an audio recording by hitting a drum. If you keep a steady beat, the samples play in the order they occur in the source file. If you syncopate or fall out of step with the rhythm, the order of the words gets jumbled; the more out of synch you get, the more random the order of the words seems.

Download an MP3 excerpted from a short performance with the drum here.

The source audio is sixty or so words excerpted from an audiobook I had sitting around. The text in question is Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Download an MP3 of the excerpt here.

I have some sample output from the text-based version of this program that I’ll post shortly. I’m actually surprised at how aesthetically different the jumbled sound is from the jumbled text. More experimentation is needed!

The biggest challenge of this project, unsurprisingly, was not writing the software, but segmenting the source audio into words. (Someday I’m gonna get me an intern.)

This is a test run of a piece of software I’m working on for my thesis project: the Semantic Anomalizer, an implementation of Apple’s WebKit hacked to take commands over OSC. The idea is to create a text editor that you control with devices other than a keyboard (or with an “augmented” keyboard—more on that later).

The screen shot above (click for a larger version) shows a typing session in which the size of the text under the cursor is being controlled by a Processing applet sending out values from a sine wave function. The text in question is the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon.

look kind on my long
house no are you can
the them mean lot up
house them thought school he
look not okay this long
pay no you story free
find life white seen among
united help sometimes fact time
idea university along too long
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