drama keys

drama keys RV paint
only type bad days
sloths chinchilla
class sicilia
legu zamu don cofagrigus
lay the bad news on him life together

 
 

October 2-6 2013, Method de47ca56-6a20-45a7-aba0-53cdd8b6aa57 (misunderstood words)

Every once in a while I misunderstand or can’t quite make out what someone is saying. So I tried to think of a way to turn this into something poetic using an OULIPO-style constrained writing technique.

When I had these misunderstandings at home, I started writing down the words that I heard, along with the words that it turned out were actually said. Then I paired them together into lines of verse. For example, someone said “bad days” and I heard “drama keys”. Someone said “bad days” and I heard “RV paint”. I paired them together to make the first couple of lines. It’s not really computer-generated, but it recalls the earlier work with speech recognition failures, and it is algorithmic:

Method de47ca56-6a20-45a7-aba0-53cdd8b6aa57 (misunderstood words)

1. in everyday speech, when misunderstanding words, write down: a) the misunderstood words as heard, b) the actual words, as determined by subsequent clarification subdialogue

2. Let the set of words be w_{i j} where w is a nonzero set of words, i is the condition (misunderstood or actual) and j is a number identifying the utterance. Order the sets of words such that:
w_m1 w_m2
w_a1 w_a2
w_m3 w_m4
w_a3 w_a4
…

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