Interactive Frank
Joe Frank “Critically acclaimed broadcaster and performance artist …” “a master of the dark, humorous and absurd” Shows aired on WFMU and NPR Series of fictitious narrative monologues, dramas, "real life" phone conversations, and often all of the above My inspiration for author model
Charles Marks Ex-girlfriend’s grandfather Loved to talk about his past Could spout off loosely related anecdotes for hours on end, with minimal input Perfect model for interactivizing Joe Frank
Make it Interactive? What if the user could guide an Joe Frank-esque audio montage in the same way that I could “guide” my conversations with Mr. Marks?
Jobs Author – take input from the user and try to make sense of it Actors – communicate with the author and try to say something relevant to the input - Lenny –Wikipedia
- Oswald - LiveJournal
DJ (and daemon) – communicate with author and try to play a song from your hard drive that matches the overall theme of the input
Technical Details Google API FreeTTS (text-to-speech) - Not so good, but you can set pitch, WPM, style, and its free
MP3s on your hard drive ID3 Tags (blinkenlights) w/help from allmusic.com dict.org (especially Moby Thesaurus) Wikipedia LiveJournal RSS
The Interface Currently works only with single adjectives Eventually, I would like it to accept sentences, and do some sort of simple analysis of what words are “important” eg: surreal, uplifting, horrible, sublime, etc.
Meanwhile… When you start up the program, the DJ begins searching your hard drive. When it encounters an MP3, it checks the ID3 tags DJ keeps track of Artists with lists of “moods”, and songs by that artist
Themes When you enter a word, a “theme” is constructed. The Theme consults dict.org and retrieves synonyms When there is more than one valid theme, the Author goes to work The themes are the primary narrative guide
The Author The Author analyzes the Themes created by the user Whenever there is an intersection between two themes, we have encountered something important (a focus) These foci are what is handed to the DJ and the Actors as “inspiration”
The Actors When the themes have been analyzed, the results are fed to the Actors The Actors then take turns reading a line The have different sources and different ways of gathering material
Lenny Lenny here loves to drop science His body of knowledge comes from the WikiPedia He finds an article that has something to do with the foci and reads a sentence from it
Oswald Oswald is into drama He reads from LiveJournal
Modularity Authors can be added I had to get rid of Fitz (my original character) –he couldn’t get his act together Eventually, the authors will have values that will determine when they will say a line.
The DJ The DJ is also taking cues from the Author He is going through his list of Artists, comparing the “moods” against the foci that the Author has determined Once he has found the artist that best matches the themes, he begins to play a song. The process starts over when the song has ended
Is it Narrative? No The result is a disjointed series of sentences, not nearly as cohesive as I want it to be What could make it narrative? - Themes should be influenced by previous input
- Use n-grams
- GoogleAPI should allow more than 1000 queries a day
Then what’s the point? I thought that the DJ was remarkable effective. The dialogue was often very entertaining I could often fill in the blanks of the dialogue and come up with a cohesive narrative of my own With more work, it could definitely get better
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