http://www.freebsoft.org/speechd
http://www.festvox.org/festival/
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/

Some of them might be useful as a start.

--
Robert Kern
rk...@ucsd.edu

And congratulations on the release of Scandroid Version 1.0a (written in
Python) on 18.iii.05 (as you elegantly record it).

All this begs the question: Have any poems been written in Python
(similar to the well-known Perl Poetry (see
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Programming/Languages/Perl/...
)?

Indeed, have any poems ever been written about Python - other than "The
Zen of Python" by Tim Peters? A limerick, even?

There once was a language called Python...

(which is pretty close to having three anapaestic left feet)

or more promisingly, rhyme-wise, but metrically rather worse :

There once was a mathematician named van Rossum...

It's a very big opportunity for me to find someone that both is a poet and
knows something about programming.

First, please excuse my bad english ; I'm a french canadian.

I am dreaming to write a software to help french poets to write strict
rigourous classical poetry. Since calssical poetry is somewhat mathematical,
a lot of tasks can be automatised :

1- Counting the number of syllabs ("pied" in french) in a verse

2- Checking the rimes ; determining the strength of a rime

3- Checking compliance of a poem to a fixed pre-determined classical form (in
french, we have distique, tercet, quatrain, quintain, sixain, huitain,
dizain, triolet, vilanelle, rondeau, rondel, ballade, chant royal, sonnet,
etc.)

4- Propose a synonym that will fit in a verse, i.e. with the right amount of
syllabs

5- Suggest a missing word or expression in a verse by applying the Shannon
text generation principle

First, do you think it may be a useful tool ?
What other features you think can make it usefull for a poet ?

The first task of cutting sentences into syllabs (phonetically of course, not
typographically) is already done. It's been difficult to get it right and to
make it guess correctly with a very very high percentage.

I can very well imagine that the next task is even more difficult. I need to
translate text into phonems. Do you know some software that does it ? I guess
that voice synthetisers that translates written text into spoken text must
first translate the text into phonems. Right ? Do you know if there some way
that I can re-use some sub-modules from these projects that will translate
text into phonems ?

Regards,

Francis Girard

Le dimanche 20 Mars 2005 04:40, Charles Hartman a écrit :

There was a young man from Japan
Who never quite learned how to scan.
   He got on quite fine
   Until the last line
And then somehow he could never quite get the number of syllables
right,or make it rhyme.

So, let's accept that the first line should scan correctly, that would
make the following first lines acceptable:

A mathematician named Guido ...
The inventor of Python, called Guido ...
A mathematician (van Rossum) ...
Van Rossum, inventor of Python ...

Hopefully that will begin to get the idea across.

Since it's PyCon week, I will offer a prize of $100 to the best (in my
opinion) limerick about Python posted to this list (with a Cc: to
py...@python.org) before midday on Friday. The prize money will be my
own, so there are no other rules. I will post my judgment when the PyCon
nonsense has died down a little, but the winner will be read before the
entire PyCon audience. Get to it!

tts = pyTTS.Create()
tts.Speak('This is the sound of my voice.')

On Mac OS X you can use:
import os

os.system("say 'This is the sound of my voice.'")

The closest I have an answer to your questions about Python and poetry  
(aside from the Scandroid) is a book called *Virtual Muse: Experiments  
in Computer Poetry* which Wesleyan published something close to ten  
years ago; I don't think it's out of print yet, but I don't keep good  
track. It was out of a casual remark there (about a very primitive  
program not even directly talked about in the boolk) that there came a  
casual remark from a reader last year which led to the Scandroid.

Charles Hartman

"The time has come for someone to put his foot down; and that foot is  
me." --Animal House

On Mar 20, 2005, at 2:10 AM, Tim Churches wrote:

Rhyme is harder -- I haven't yet tried it in English -- precisely
because text-to-phoneme is very hard.

I haven't really worked with this, that is, with the sounds of speech
(though I'm a musician as well as a poet), mostly because it's
difficult. The projects in my *Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer
Poetry"[1], for example, deal almost entirely with language as a
typographical phenomenon. So does my Scandroid, even though the
material it's working with is all aimed at and motivated by the
auditory qualities of poetry.

I do imagine you're right that the text-to-speech people have worked
out a lot of this. The trouble is that so far I haven't seen
public-domain code for the guts of such a program, which is what you
would need.

Interesting to think about which problems change between French and
English and which do not.

Good luck -- keep me posted.

I think the constraint of rhyme and meter is best served by widening
the search space at the upper levels of the tree and not the lower
levels.  That is, if you've got an image and you don't find rhyming
words for it with easy natural diction, a computerized search for more
and more obscure words to express that image in rhyme is the last
thing you want.  Rather, you want to discard the image and choose a
different one to express the idea.  That means seeking more images by
mentally revisiting and staying inside the emotion at the center of
poem, a much more difficult thing to do than solving the mere math
problem of finding a string of rhyming words with similar semantics to
a non-rhyming sequence that you already have.  But when you find the
right image, the words and rhythm fall into place without additional
effort.

A Dutch mathematician most prophetic,
Did invent a language, name herpetic.
  With design quite intelligent,
  And syntax mostly elegant,
Big ideas could be made non-hypothetic.

<SNIP>

     My dear Guido dared once to combine
     Out of objects, command of a line
         There was nary a brace.
         In their place? Some whitespace!
     And cast many their Perl before swine.

(I agree that the idiom played upon in the last line is obverted, but
but plead poetic license :-)

Best to all,

Guido van Rossum
Had an idea most awesome.
When he lost track of his braces,
Just replaced them with spaces.

Hi,

Le dimanche 20 Mars 2005 23:04, Paul Rubin a écrit :

The question is : how do you discard the image to choose another one ? How
this process takes place ? I observed myself while writing a poem (I, myself,
may not be good example since I am certainly not a good poet) and discovered
that it is while playing with the words, trying to find the right one, with
the right number of syllabs, that I discover a new image, and re-write the
whole verse, even re-arranging the whole strophe or poem. My goal with the
two last tasks (4 and 5) was to help the poor guy struggling with the words,
not to produce the correct final verse, but only to help him in one of the
phase of his writing.

Regards

that's pretty good, Paul.

However, I must insist that you both cease and desist.

Your "Allusion to the computational instructional language Python,
through the inclusion of 'brace' (and its derivative forms) and
'space' (and its derivative forms) in a rhyming couplet in a comedic
verse", while quite amusing, is a clear violation of my Intellectual
Property. My Intellectual Property rights are attested to by my extant
prior art <http://tinyurl.com/4bu3n>, the patent application pending
before the Patent Office of The Republic of Freedonia covering same,
and Darl McBride's say-so.

Having drafted a patent application covering the use of 'space' and
'brace' in poetic contexts, I saw no good reason to stop there. Hence,
the pending patent application also covers both the use of braces and
whitespace as delimiters (block or otherwise) in any language or set
of instructions, (natural, computational or otherwise artificial). So,
I must also demand that you, and the rest of the Python community
immediately cease and desist from producing any instructions, in any
language, which employ either of these syntactic constructs to
represent either structure or relations of logical dependency.

Please do note that I make no claim to 'ENDSUB' and like constructs;
insofar as my Intellectual Property rights are concerned, you are free
to employ such constructs, in any linguistic expression, including,
but not limited to, provision of instruction and poetic expression,
regardless of context or language in which they are employed.

A formal statement of my position shall be forthcoming from my
solicitors, the illustrious firm of Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe. I am
optimistic that we will be able to arrive at licencing terms both fair
and equitable.

I remain your most faithful servant,

   A mathematician, prophetic,
   invented a language, herpetic.
     decidedly brilliant,
     syntacticly elegant,
   Made ideas far less hypothetic.

Having reviewed your Cease and Desist petition, I'm afraid I must
dispute some or all of your claims:

1. Your citation of prior art has one or more significant defects:
a. In your citation, "brace" is clearly rhymed with "whitespace", not
"space".  The broad concept of "whitespace" is substantially different
from the specific term "spaces": "whitespace" encompasses all
white-printing characters, including tabs, formfeeds, and carriage
returns, as well as space characters.  In the more general field of
publishing, "whitespace" also includes page margins, paragraph breaks,
and block indentations for embedded quotes or subsections.  In my
submission, "spaces" is specifically intended to narrowly refer to the
character defined in ISO 8879 as ASCII code 32.  Especially, I did
*not* intend to include reference to the ISO 8879 ASCII code 9
character, or "tab".
b. Prior art predates your citation, see Guido van Rossum's post
"[marketing-python] How About a Slogan or Tagline?", at
http://wingware.com/pipermail/marketing-python/2002-March/003851.html,
which includes several notable references to derivative forms of
"brace" and "space".
2. As the Python language's most salient feature is its usage of spaces
for program structuring, as opposed to use of enclosing brace
characters in related scripting languages (Tcl, Perl) and compiled
languages (C, C++, Java, C#), the juxtaposition of "brace" and "space"
in any poetic construct is obvious, and this obviousness further erodes
your IP claim.
3. I think my poem was funnier - "lost track of his braces" (humorous
allusion to suspenders) is a knee-slapper! ("Perl before swine" was
cute, but it's not new.)

Still, I am open to negotiation - would you be interested in
cross-licensing my patent pending rhyming of "van Rossum" and
"awesome"?

Suite nothings do our blocks express
which doth our code transparently dress,
delighting the many who view
while confounding a relative few ...
and rightly conferring to Guido much fame,
though Guido van Rossum is only one name.
There's a "this" to import for a hint
why so many contribute a stint.

The beauty, the Zen, the generous ethos attract,
But it's not deniable it's a definite fact
that that really's not explaining it all:
It's a good bet they're having a ball ;-)