Computational tools aid songwriters looking for inspired lyrics, titles
A Carnegie Mellon University research has developed a set of tools that help songwriters come up with inspired lyrics and titles – including some pretty odd ones.
Burr Settles’ tools – compiled on the Muse website — will get a workout next month when the annual February Album Writing Month (FAWM) international songwriting event takes place, with participants composing 14 songs in 28 days. Last year, one of the songs written using Settles’ Titular tool – “I Am Your Adult” – made it onto the FAWM compilation CD.
Titular cranks out five potential song titles every time you click on the “get new titles” button. Samples: “Spray betta nine,” “I’ve split a dj” and “porno else.” Who couldn’t picture Lady Gaga kicking off a concert with any of those songs?
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Another tool from Settles is called LyriCloud and spits out a selection of possible words to include in your lyrics based on you typing a word into a search box. I went with a few techie terms, including Windows (which of course could be interpreted different ways). Words offered up by LyriCloud: Barred, Broken, Bullet-Proof, Office and Sun – all intriguing on multiple levels to any Microsoft user. (I also tried Linux, but LyriCloud shot back that it had no recommendations.)
Settles, a post-doctoral fellow in CMU’s Machine Learning Department, devised his songwriting tools in part by creating a linguistic model based on analyzing more than 137,000 songs from thousands of popular and obscure artists, and then tagging each word based on its part of speech.
“Writing lyrics that succinctly tell a story, express emotion or create an image in the listener’s mind is challenging,” said Settles, in a statement. “Even professional songwriters have trouble coming up with evocative titles or juicy words for the refrain. It seemed to me that the kinds of computational techniques we use to analyze natural language could be adapted to help overcome writer’s block.”
There is no shortage of songwriting aids available, some being hawked by self-help outfits and others freely available online. Even David Bowie created one called Verbasizer. But Settles, who helped to launch FAWM in 2004, argues that his tools simplify the process.
For more on network research, follow my AlphaDoggs blog. I popped “Bob” into LyriCloud and got words such as Bark, Brother and Nothing in response… You can follow my musical postings on Twitter, StumbleUpon and Facebook.
