This site was created as a final project for Digital Humanities, LSC597, Spring 2014, as part of the MLIS program at the University of Rhode Island. The project's goals are to facilitate a new way of manipulating and researching a verse-based corpus, exploring the astronomical (but not nearly infinite) number of possible combinations, vectorizing text, and exposing themes, relationships, and other features of a corpus that may not have been apparent otherwise, in a process based on what some might call "artificial intelligence".
It also facilitates the sharing of interesting remixes by generating very short verse mashups for publication on Twitter. Not only will social media sharing expose more people to the project, the scale of social media has the potential to move us closer than otherwise possible to actually creating all of the 183! possible combinations of lyrics.
In one of our readings this semester, the YA novel Unwind, Harlan has been unwound, physically separated into component parts, those parts used in other human beings to repair or augment their bodies or minds. At the story's conclusion, when all the people who received Harlan's parts assemble in the same place, the question hangs in the air, "Does Harlan still exist? Is he here?" As such, this project can pose similar questions. When we disassemble and reconstruct these songs, is the thing we're bringing together a Billie Holiday song? It has those parts, comparable lengths, imminent shareability. But if we add a melody, is it a song?
In pulling apart Holiday's lyrics, we can recognize some lines -- "What love endures" or "Hush now, don't explain" carry with them popular recognition and meaning, while, "I love my man" could be (and has been) written by any of thousands of lyricists. What is it that makes some of these lines so identifiably Holiday, while others are less definitive? (And could we suggest that, in the example of an "unwound" person, above, some parts carry with them more identity than others?)
In Interpreting Popular Music, David Brackett offers some analysis of Holiday and her music that can help us as we look at these reconstructed texts:
I will discuss two other topics that recur in the biographical literature on Billie Holiday: the topic of the masochistic lover and what might be called a "meta-topic," the idea of the importance of sincerity to her as a person and performer. Both of these topics probably have their root in what at least two writers have recently described as Holiday's propensity for "self-invention." ...Biographers have detected a "pattern" of masochistic relationships dating back to her first marriage in 1941... The themes of failed, even masochistic, romantic love and drug addiction seem to form the major components in the "sadness" and "hard life" which so many reviewers seemed to hear in her music.
When you Remix Holiday, do you encounter these themes? While in some remixes, the narrative might seem a bit disjointed, do you still feel the desperation, the sadness? John Moore mentions Holiday and others in his exploration of torch singers:
In terms of lyrical content, a torch song can be characterized as a lament sung by a woman who desperately loves a commonplace or even brutish man. The latter treats her badly, leaves her or no longer cares for her. Occasionally, he ignores or rebuffs her tentative advances. And yet she remains inexplicably enslaved to him.
Do your remixes feel like torch songs? Even though they're constructions of disjoint component parts, do they remain recognizable as the genre of the original, unjumbled compositions?
Another interesting analog could be the Piet Mondrian experiment in which researchers at Bell Labs, in 1966, compared computer-generated art with Mondrian's "Composition With Lines". The computer was programmed to understand certain qualities of the original painting (many small lines of various lengths, in either horizontal or vertical orientation, creating a circle shape). The most surprising part of this experiment was that subjects preferred the computer generated artwork, and generally guessed incorrectly about which piece was created by a human, and which by a computer.
Can you tell whether or not your Tweet is actually three lines in the original order? Are some random compositions actually more pleasant, moving, or enjoyable than the human-written lyrics?
Project completion date: 8 May 2014
Brackett, D. (2000). Interpreting popular music. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Moore, J. (2000). 'The Heiroglyphics of Love': The Torch Singers and Interpretation in R. Middleton (Ed.) Reading pop: approaches to textual analysis in popular music (pp. 262-296). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Noll, A. M. (1966). Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian's "Composition With Lines" (1917) and a Computer-Generated Picture. The Psychological Record, 16, 1-10.
Shusterman, N. (2007). Unwind. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.
Image of Billie Holiday from the William P. Gottlieb Collection in the Library of Congress. This image entered into the public domain on 16 February 2010.
