Katie Haegele of LaLaTheory writes a bi-weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled DigitaLit. I like to republish her articles here because of their unique combination of writing, reading and digital art. Here’s this week’s article (I added the links.)

The words go round and round and they come out here

Have you ever seen voice-recognition software at work?

Once it’s running on your computer, you start talking, and your words appear on the screen as though a phantom stenographer were typing them, or like a player piano that makes text instead of music.

Kurt Newman is a person who makes music – an improvisational guitarist, actually – and one day he watched with fascination as one of his professors used a voice-recognition program to write a paper. He wondered: What would a program like that do with guitar music?

Maybe it would treat it as a voice, and attempt to make sense of the sounds as words of English.

He decided to find out, and the resulting experiment was just the kind of collaboration he and his wife, poet Michelle Detorie, had been trying to find.

Detorie, who lives with Newman in Goleta, Calif., is a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts literary fellow. Her big interest is in divination – the ancient practice of reading signs in nature to answer questions or predict the future.

“Divination is an attempt to learn or ‘figure out’ something by interpreting omens or some sort of data: tea leaves, ashes, entrails, the movements of animals, weather, and other things,” Detorie explained in an e-mail interview. Astrology is a kind of divination; so is feng shui.

Detorie was initially interested in divination practiced by women, and wrote a series of poems on the subject.

One form that particularly captured her imagination was daphnomancy, in which a diviner burns branches of a laurel tree and interprets the sounds made as they crackle on the fire.

For some time Detorie and Newman had wanted to bring their music and poetry together, but nothing they’d thought of seemed right. They didn’t want the music to be just a backdrop for the text, nor did they want poetry that interpreted the music in some obvious way.

Perhaps using this artificial-intelligence tool as a kind of divining rod was the answer.

So Newman found one of the less expensive programs on the market, ViaVoice, and bought it on eBay for about $20.

“Michelle and I figured that the cheaper the software, the more likely it was to produce weird, and thus artistically interesting, glitches,” Newman said, also in an e-mail.

Then they primed it by feeding it language.

“You read passages into the computer, you feed the software documents,” Detorie said. “For the dictation process, I tried reading in funny voices. Kurt tried playing his guitar into the machine, but it didn’t really work for whole passages. For documents, I fed it all sorts of stuff – glossaries from art and biology textbooks, poems, articles from Wikipedia. I wanted to sort of stuff it with interesting vocabulary and different types of grammatical structures.”

When the software was ready, Newman and Detorie sat in front of their computer, and Newman began playing his guitar. As he made music, the machine spat out “incomprehensible chunks of text,” Detorie said – real words of English that looked like word salad, rather than sentences with semantic meaning.

Then she stepped into the role of diviner. As the text was being generated she looked for patterns and meaning and altered, amended, and shaped it into lines of poetry.

Detorie and Newman even treated some of their sessions like real acts of fortune-telling, asking questions of the process and looking for answers in the text.

“Most were questions we found on the Internet, like, ‘My daughter is always crying; what is the problem?’ Mostly we just picked questions that we liked.”

The spontaneously constructed poems, perhaps unsurprisingly, are noteworthy for their language, which has a strong musical quality.

“Owl on a low howl in a catacombed cave,” goes the lilting first line of the poem “an alliance of grammar.”

So far, the daphnomancy project has been performed live in Austin, Texas. Detorie also collected a number of the poems and arranged them into a chapbook, which she sells on the online art marketplace etsy.com. That, incidentally, was how I discovered the project, plinking around on the site one day as I shopped for a birthday present.

You wouldn’t call that divination, I guess – just good luck, and an ear tuned to whatever in the universe I might be able to overhear.

 

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Katie Haegele lives in Montgomery County. 

You can read some of her poems, essays, and other writing on her Web site, The La-La Theory (www.thelalatheory.com).

WOW, are the Nanowrimo.org forums are already ablaze with posts. I can’t keep up (especially since it loads so slowly).

For the uninitiated, National Novel Writing Month is November of every year. We have an on-line community at nanowrimo.org., but the community is spilling out all over in interesting ways.

Firstly, let’s talk forums. My favorite discussion thread forums at nanowrimo are Character and Plot Realism Q & A and Plot Doctoring. I like to scan and respond; I don’t post many questions myself. The level of expertise in some of the reply threads is astounding, e.g. I took two years of Latin but I couldn’t have conjugated the fictitious term “New Catholics,” as writer dingospleen did in response to writer Kateness’s question.

Secondly, I have a TON of work to do on my plot in the next few days before Nano begins. Unfortunately, I don’t have long periods of time to work, especially not in quiet. But the plot will come; I really wish I had time to make Nanowrimo videos. 

Yes, a process that once depended soley on whether or not a writer had enough ink, paper and ideas is now being expanded by next generation media. Viddler has a Nanowrimo group that anyone can join, where writers talk about their projects and vent about the stress, but what is really interesting on the Nanowrimo video front is that amateur book videos are showing up on YouTube. Mostly, the videos are mashup trailers of still images, music and text, but they are great examples (here and here too) of how social media is becoming integrated in the creative process. Some of the young Nanowrimo participants on YouTube are especially attuned to Web 2.0 applications and their use in stirring interest in their projects and inspiration in themselves. Check ’em out if you have time.

Do you NanoWriMo? Got a video? Comment and link. And don’t forget to tell us your username and your fave forums!

My background is in psychology. Now I’m a writer. And I blog. Why not bring those three interests together? Introducing WACKO WEDNESDAYS!

Every Wednesday, I’ll introduce a personality trait/disorder writing meme. Use the info to add interesting facets to your characters. We all have little behaviors/beliefs/superstitions/pathology that make us unique. Your characters are the same way. Make them memorable, give ’em a small disorder or related personality flaw.

Since it’s raining here on this chilly Fall day, let us start Wacko Wednesdays simply with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

I’m sure you’ve heard of SAD. In a nutshell, it is depression in the winter months. Experts debate on its causes, origins, treatments and whether or not it should even have a name other than “depression,” but SAD has been publicized enough that you can write it into your novel and assume most readers can follow along (the controversy can help make things interesting, too).

Here is an academic article explaining SAD. The article goes into detail about the symptoms and behaviors of a person with SAD. Here’s a link from that page that leads to an end-user pamphlet explaining SAD, which contains enough information for you to get the gist, including this:

Not everyone with SAD has the same symptoms, but common symptoms of
		  winter depression include the following: 

A change in appetite, especially a craving for sweet or starchy
			 foods

Weight gain 

A heavy feeling in the arms or legs 

A drop in energy level

Fatigue 

A tendency to oversleep 

Difficulty concentrating 

Irritability 

Increased sensitivity to social rejection 

Avoidance of social situations 

Symptoms of the summer depression version of SAD are poor appetite,
		  weight loss and insomnia. Either type of SAD may also include some of the
		  symptoms that are present in other kinds of depression, such as feelings of
		  guilt, a loss of interest or pleasure in activities you used to enjoy, ongoing
		  feelings of hopelessness or helplessness, or physical problems such as
		  headaches and stomach aches.

Symptoms of SAD keep coming back and tend to come and go at about the
		  same time every year. The changes in mood are not necessarily related to
		  obvious seasonal stressors (like being regularly unemployed during the winter).
		  

Simply write these things into a character’s profile, and have the character (and plot) act accordingly. This type of research for personality quirks can be done easily on-line. A developmental or adolescent psychology textbook also has a wealth of information that can help you build believable, “real” characters.

Do you have any questions or suggestions for the WW meme? Please comment here or email me at yahoo(dot)com with username ccp6867.

Come back to PC on Wacko Wednesdays for the next personality quirk meme!

Viddler Tee I got at Podcamp Philly