rwet final: rain poem
about
For my project, I was interested in language on a purely phonetic, bodily level.
One of my obsessions before this class was Christian Bok’s Eunoia— the idea that certain vowel sounds inherently carry certain characteristics, and specifically scaffold certain world languages more than other.
In his writing, you can really see this with the flowy French phrases in “Chapter E,” and the terser Arabic vocab in “Chapter A”.
Eunoia took Bok 7 years to write “manually.” I wonder if anyone’s taken a stab at writing this with computer procedure.
There’s such a material quality to spoken word—which are just meaty vibrations, with different ways of stopping air. My 1-month bare bones knowledge of linguistics tells me that air stopped with my lips, versus with teeth, versus tongue, are the most low-level differentiators between sounds that are innately “aggressive,” or innately “soft.”
For me, the exciting computational aspect was glomming together intense similarities in record time— creating this hyper-active form of English that almost evolved into something more abstractly shaped, like music.
procedure
See the source code here: GITHUB
Thank you to Allison Parrish for code help, as well as to Ayal’s project which uses pronouncing + spacy. I referenced code for my "rhyme()" function from there.
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I used the pronouncing library to riff off of seed phrases, which were mostly chosen on a phonetic level:
How well would they amplify the effect of the rhyme?
The main source code borrowed code from the Pronouncing notebook. I put it in a separate function;
Here’s a few examples of this function in action:
Output:
This one ended up being problematic in its rhyming... I was really upset that it kept returning a racial slur..... Which with Allison’s help + word.filters, I got fixed.
Most of the other poems follow this formula too.
One that stood out as different:
“Rain in spain,” was the only string that has some kind of intentional cultural reference. Originally from “My Fair Lady,” it acts as a kind of shibboleth for lower-class dialects; there’s a whole song about her conforming her vowel dipthongs.
Seemed effective to riff off of something well-known?
performance
(will post pictures of performance once I get them!)
Overally, I was happy with my feedback on the performance. The pacing was good, and took practice to get there.
Got helpful feedback from Allison and others about not rushing through the language; the contrast in pacing allows the sound to become abstract. When meaningful semantic moments push through, there’s a shift in attention to the “word-ness” of these sounds.
Our guest critics offered that it might add interest/meaning to use a culturally familiar “base” phrase, like I’m doing with “rain in spain.” Could be a nice way to push it further. Or create some kind of narrative? If I could add meaning to this beyond sound...
For sure, all this rhymey stuff I’m doing already has its immediate place in pop culture: tongue twisters, hip hop music, to start. Sofia mentioned that this was a very “American English” performance. Could be interesting to explore different subcultures/languages of rhyme.
One thing I felt worked well here and in my classmate’s was making a single “seed” transparent, and iterating off the same seed. The repetition + resulting shift take advantage of this permutating, infinite world of computational weirdness.










