TransProse
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TransProse

Translating Literature into Music


About

TransProse is a project by Hannah Davis. There have been several iterations with different implementations, but the core idea is the same: it is a program that finds different features throughout a work of text, and programmatically creates music with a similar emotional tone and underlying structure.

Hannah Davis is a programmer/artist/musician based in New York City. 
Website: www.hannahishere.com
Twitter: @ahandvanish

Using natural language processing, TransProse reads in text and determines densities of various features throughout the novel. The musical piece chronologically follows the novel. It uses the text data to determine the tempo, key, notes, octaves, etc. for the piece. The pieces are available for download at https://transprose.bandcamp.com/album/first-iteration

Feel free to reach out for any commercial, personal, or artistic projects. 

​This application in part makes use of the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon, created by Saif Mohammad and Peter Turney at the National Research Council Canada. Many thanks to Saif in particular for ongoing support and conversation.

Thesis Presentation on the First Iteration (2013):