[Rumori] popautomate

[Colin Hinz]

On Fri, 16 May 2003, Steev Hise wrote:

> This is a really cool web audio project. the artists have
> collected and snipped and sorted individual words from pop songs.
> you can search for words and play them back, or give a sentence
> and it will construct an mp3 of the sentence, or as much of it as
> it can based on the words it can find.
>
> http://www.sacem.free.fr/

Didn't this come up sometime last year? At any rate, nice to see
the reminder.

Have they made any source code available? I've got several hours
of some pretty kickass radio banter from a CBC* announcer, with
announcements, extended "profile" segments, and interviews, with
subjects ranging from Margaret Atwood to Genesis P. Orridge.

For *years* I've wanted to run textfile transcriptions of the
stuff through a Markov-chain babelizer and then use the babbletext
to string together the spoken words -- a fake-surrealist D'oke,
more or less. But I couldn't get around the fact that, given my
level of programming skills, I would be stuck doing *everything*
by hand. Which explains why I've made zip for progress with this
project.

Automating the assembling part would make the project viable. I'd
still have to generate the textfiles and the individual-word sound
files, but once that was done, fresh "output" would be as easy as
running a few scripts.

- Colin Hinz
  Toronto, Canada

*CBC = Canadian Broadcast Corporation, a bit like NPR but with much
 cooler music in some of the slots.