Reflections on two generative sonic poems: Once Upon a Time and Chaos?
In Once Upon a Time, I wanted to imagine how an AI/Robot could tell a story. I first asked ChatGPT to generate a short story poem starting and ending with traditional tropes. Random words were changed based on word2vec similarities. These changes give new directions to the story and to the music. To me, they corresponded to some mechanical explorations of creativity. These random changes created feelings of surprise, enthusiasm, or unease (especially because of gender-related language biases). I aimed to accentuate these feelings with an accelerating tempo that reflects the evolution of AI. The poem ends with a back-to-normal tempo for the final straight and unchanged sentence “They lived happily ever after”, as if the AI had reached a certain point (of human intelligence/creativity?). Upon sharing the poem with friends, they felt that it was animated and told by a person, which was a crucial aspect of my intent. In my research, I am interested in computational story-writing assistants. Through this poem, I aimed to share reflections on the nature of creativity and on how computers might aid in its expression.
In Chaos?, I was inspired by the popular concept of “alignment” from Dungeons & Dragons. In D&D, alignment corresponds to a categorization of the ethical and moral perspective of a player character or any other being, based on two complementary scales — one that opposes “law” to “chaos”, and another that opposes “good” to “evil”. Through mathematical embeddings, these scales can be mapped to actual axes, along which any word can be formally analyzed by projecting related vectors on them. In Chaos?, an author inputs a prompt that is transformed into a final output, where each word is assigned to the closest extreme on the scales of “law”, “chaos”, “good”, or “evil”. The degree of “evil” and “chaos” associated with each word is then used to determine the pitch of the sound, as well as the randomness of the rhythm and amplitude. The poem is composed of the appearing words, each of them being a classification, i.e. a vision of the world through a specific prism. I wanted it to be felt like a strong visual and auditive judgment, almost divine, assigned by an external computing force that is, here, the machine, but generally the Game Master, creator of imaginary worlds. I was very curious to see how the algorithm would classify each word. It often led to disturbing results (e.g., “God” is classified as “Evil”).
Jean-Peïc Chou
