Somebody has finally, finally invented something that I have been searching for all of my life: a way to give novels their own soundtrack. It’s called the TransProse project, and it uses experimental new software to “read” the text of a novel, which it then transforms into piano pieces to follow the narrative and emotion of the story.
Developed by New York programmer and musician Hannah Davis and Canadian National Research Council computational linguistics expert Saif Mohammad, TransProse works by analyzing the frequency and intensity of the emotional cues within a novel’s text. Davis and Mohammad presented their technology in a paper entitled “Generating Music From Literature” in Sweden, at the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) event.
After “reading” the text, the software can recognize eight different emotions—anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust—and determine their “density” within the story. The density of the emotion is what TransProse uses to come up with the key, tempo, notes and octaves of each musical piece, which it then structures to follow the plot and emotions of the novel. The music, much like it’s inspirational text, is broken into sections: beginning, early middle, late middle, and of course the ending .
Davis and Mohammad have run several classic novels through their program, including Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” but there are still some bugs to be worked out, according to their project page.
“The current version of TransProse is just the beginning of our investigation, and we don’t claim to be making beautiful music yet,” says the team of its program. “This iteration is a starting point to see if we could programmatically translate the basic emotions of a novel into a musical piece that holds the same basic emotional feeling.”
While we still don’t know if or when this tech will ever be commercially available—let it be soon, universe, I need this—you can listen to some of the music TransProse has generated for those novels on their project’s music page. Let me know what you think!
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