5 4 5 Day 5

Adam Moore
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

LAST DAY!!!

Before I can feel completely relieved let’s get down to documenting my last project. This morning I picked the most open ended prompt so far. Here it is:

Do something generous towards yourself

Very very open ended. Given my love for poetry I wanted to see if I could figure out how to incorporate it into my last 5 4 5 project. Working with things you love is definitely an act of generosity towards oneself. People talk frequently about the beauty of well written code, how it can approach poetry, but I wanted to use actual poetry. After doing some research I found that P5 has a speech recognition portion. It is a relatively new addition to P5.

After hours of exploring this new library I felt comfortable enough to try to get it to interact with me. There was a lot of trial and error, mostly error. Because this library is so new there is not very much documentation and the examples don’t all work. Fortunately for me, just because the examples don’t work doesn’t mean that the library is faulty. The speech recognition works quite well. I also experimented with a function called interimResults, but since the program I wrote will answer several questions, and the mic is always on, the computer would hear itself talking and start to behave strangely. It actually reminded me of an animal seeing its reflection and becoming alarmed.

SO, I had to let the speech recognition software be a bit strict. This results in my having to be VERY clear in my pronunciation of the commands. Despite sounding slightly deranged this program does read pieces of two different poems. The “new” poem is by Tracy K. Smith, it is a portion of The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. The old poem is by Dylan Thomas, it is a portion of This Side of the Truth. Below are two videos of the program in action.

https://vimeo.com/288098448

https://vimeo.com/288098442

For one day I would consider this finished. I feel that with more time I could make this more interesting but, I would have to think much more about it and I simply don’t have time for that!

I hope you all enjoyed these projects as much as I enjoyed making them. Now it’s time for bed!

Adam Moore

Written by

http://adamoore.net

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