Rhyme Science, NanoRhymo, Sh💩t Your Inner Voice Says, and my album! — Angela Brett, JoCo Cruise 2021
Channel: Angela Brett
Date: 25/04/2021

During my rap about why I perform at open mics (https://angelastic.bandcamp.com/track/why-i-perform-at-open-mics) I mention that my Masters thesis was a rhyming dictionary. Since we’re on a Zoom call and not a boat, I can show my rhyming dictionary. It’s at http://rhyme.science and it tells you what kind of accent you need for different rhymes to work. In my song ‘Who We Are’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-nmFWmCXTM&list=PLJ-l6mr1dW0gVK9y3KGCNuwUADufNqmNk&index=2), I pretended not to have the trap-bath split (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap–bath_split) so I could near-rhyme ‘demand all’ with ‘handles’. Rhyme.science doesn’t have that split, but it does have the father-bother merger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_open_back_vowels#Father–bother_merger) the cot-caught merger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cot–caught_merger) and rhoticity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English). It’s not perfect, since I created it by using the text-to-speech API on macOS to find pronunciations of words and phrases from a word list (SCOWL: http://wordlist.aspell.net) and about 1% of wikipedia (http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~westburylab/downloads/westburylab.wikicorp.download.html) and then went through manually to separate the father-bother vowels, since the text-to-speech voices that supported the API I was using happen to have those merged. Wikipedia sometimes has misspelled words, the API sometimes mispronounces obscure words, and the way the different mergers and splits interact can vary. But it was good enough for a thesis, and good enough for me to use for my own poetry.

In particular, I use the random rhyme feature (http://rhyme.science/?random=1) to participate in NanoRhymo (not to be confused with NaNoWriMo: https://nanowrimo.org) where I tweet very short rhyming poems inspired by random rhymes. I tweet random rhymes occasionally on https://twitter.com/rhymescience This is not a bot, because the rhymes are not always accurate, and when they’re accurate, they’re not always interesting — for instance, it might tell you that ‘interesting’ rhymes with ‘uninteresting’. So I tweet from it sporadically when I personally find an interesting random rhyme.

The two NanoRhymo poems I showed are Kneel: https://twitter.com/macaronique/status/1068251012916498432, which you can get a recording of at https://angelastic.bandcamp.com/track/kneel, and Bernard: https://twitter.com/macaronique/status/1067547762584141824 which you can get a recording of at https://angelastic.bandcamp.com/track/bernard

The reason I thought to use text-to-speech to create rhyme.science was that I was already familiar with the API. Back in 2004, I met Apple speech engineer Kim Silverman at WWDC, and he showed me the Repeat After Me app, which allows you to fine-tune the intonation of text-to-speech using the TUNE format. A few years later, wanting to write a song parody (this one: https://angelastic.com/2008/09/28/ten-of-clubs-still-point-five/) but being shy about singing, I wrote an app to generate the TUNE format given some text and some notes. Repeat After Me is more suited for mimicking natural speech intonations, so it was not that convenient for creating singing. Initially I entered the notes manually, but that was tedious, so I bought a MIDI keyboard and got the code to listen to notes from that (which resulted in this hasty song: https://angelastic.com/2008/12/01/two-of-clubs-pretender/) Later I got the app to read UltraStar files, and had it sing Still Alive, because back then Still Alive was the song everyone was getting their weird creations to play: https://angelastic.com/2010/03/29/video-mac-singing-still-alive/

I made various other recordings since, but the one I show here is Sh💩t Your Inner Voice Says (https://angelastic.bandcamp.com/track/shit-your-inner-voice-says), a four-part harmony about self-confidence and poop which I created while learning about harmonies from John Anealio (https://johnanealio.bandcamp.com) I forgot to share my sound when I shared my screen, so people didn’t hear it so well; in this video I’ve added in the original sound of it.

Anyway, then I go on to plug my brand new 42-track album of poetry, Wake Up Gasping (https://angelastic.bandcamp.com/album/wake-up-gasping). It was produced by Philipp Conrad at SkyStudio Vienna (http://skystudio.at) and has cover art by Joseph Camann of the Camannwordsmith Patreon (http://patreon.com/camannwordsmith) among other things (https://linktr.ee/camannwordsmith)

The full show is at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ-l6mr1dW0gVK9y3KGCNuwUADufNqmNk