Category Archives: Poetry

Computer Generated Text Woos Venture Money

The NYT has proof that news about the weather and sports needs no human touch, if all the reader wants is a list of facts loosely strung together

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

Computers writing prose and poetry and news have been around for as long as the Internet itself. Have you tried the Elizabethan insult generator or the random prose generator?

The important shift in this story is that people who want to make a high return on their investment are getting interested in pushing to make a sizable profit from the automation of language. The issue thus becomes whether pressure to build this new market will bleed straight into phishers and spammers who have already proven they know how to use automation to turn the news into easy money.

The NYT shamefully gives no credit to attackers who have been successfully composing text from automation for years, nor do they mention the risks from blindly accepting computer-generated text as worthy of consumption.

The few sports writers I read have a specific style and sense of humor. I’m not interested in the data on the game, since I could get that anywhere, but rather how they interpret and present the information based on their particular/unique view of the world.

Update: And in the end a computer that has a particular view of the world will still be just a shallow reflection of the person who programmed it. My presentation at BSidesLV 2011 (2011: A Cloud Odyssey) addressed this issue in great depth. I’ve been asked a lot lately to post the slides from that talk so I’ll upload them soon.

Hallo (featuring Tout Puissant Mukalo and Nelly Liyemge)

An album of Congolese artists is being produced by DRC Music, led by UK musician Damon Albarn. It seems to be in the vein of similar efforts such as Paul Simon’s Running with the Saints or David Byrne’s O Samba.

The question is thus whether Tout Puissant Mukalo, Jupiter and the Okwess International, Bokatola System, Evala Litongo, Nelly Liyemge and others will achieve greater international recognition, or is this really about Albarn? He did not use remote collaboration or cloud for the work and instead traveled in person with a huge crew to sit face-to-face and record and produce local sound in the Congo.

Hallo (featuring Tout Puissant Mukalo and Nelly Liyemge) by DRC Music

One of the strangest things I find is that Albarn lays down his fairly simplistic beats before Congolese sounds are layered over them. This is like an American executive from McDonalds traveling to France and telling a chef that they are going to “collaborate” on a meal by using the chef’s sauce on two all beef patties with a sesame seed bun. Albarn’s production crew could work on producing sounds and poetry on top but why take away the most important elements of Congolese music?

So the boring Gorillaz style of beat is what turns me away from the example above. Nelly Liyemge sounds awesome but totally out of place with the low-energy slow beat. Here’s another sample:

Lingala (featuring Bokatola System and Evala Litongo) by DRC Music

Boom, chick, boom, chick? The timeline should fade into the beat, not be the beat. It gets better after 30 seconds but still sounds watered down from the beats straight out of the DRC.

The above songs will be released on an album called Kinshasa One Two by Warp Records next month (October 3rd). They are said to be a benefit for Oxfam. Too bad Oxfam could not just release Congolese music directly to the world as a benefit. I wonder if they have to cover the costs of “production” by a large group traveling in person to Kinshasa, DRC.

Here’s a wonderfully complex soukous beat that Albarn misses completely in the above examples:

…not to mention street beats. Just about every song in the following compilation video, recorded live, puts Albarn’s production to shame. 5:18 is perhaps the most comparable style but on a whole different level:

Maybe Albarn just didn’t know what to do when he heard Congolese rhythms like the following drum line or maybe the project is really just about him being only slightly influenced by them:

Limbe

by the Italian group S-Tone Inc. from their 2002 album Sobrenatural (featuring Italian jazz vocalist Laura Fedele)

Translation by me.

Le ciel c’est comme un voile The sky it’s like a veil
c’est immobile le soir all quiet in the evening
on entend pas le bruit so there is no noise
de tes pas sur le sol as you pass over the ground
 
Pas de destination Without a destination
ni meme d’intention but no intent for
total absence de joie lack of joy
et de peine or suffering
 
Tu viens vers tu n’sais quoi You come to what you don’t know
unique la direction single direction
Tu n’as pas de reponses You have no answers
ni meme de demandes nor any requests
 
Tu viens You go…
 
Le but c’est inconnue Purpose unknown
il s’agit de l’instinct it is from instinct
tu ne t’interroge pas Do not ask
si c’est bien ou si c’est mal if it’s right or wrong
 
Comme un fantome qui glisse Like a ghost that glides
qui n’a plus de sexe who has more ecstasy
entre la realite between the realities
l’inconscience et le reve the unconsciousness and dreams
 
Tu viens vers tu n’sais quoi You come to what you don’t know
unique la direction single direction
Tu n’as pas de reponses You have no answers
ni meme de demandes nor any requests
 
Tu viens You go…
 
Comme ca tu simplement tu viens You enjoy how you simply
suspendu sous un ciel indefini hover below an undefined sky
 
pas de couleurs no color
pas de sons no sound
pas de souvenirs no memories
 
hier yesterday
demain tomorrow
rien nothing
 
seulement le present only the present
le moment qui passe, qui glisse the moment passing, gliding
qui revient, exactament egale a lui meme returning, exactly equal to itself
 
Tu viens You go…
 

I also noticed a Stone Roses style remix by Fred Ventura