by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
(Updated from the archive)
Rock star David Bowie co-wrote a program that generated lyric ideas. It gave him inspiration for some of his most famous songs. It generated sentences at random based on something called the ‘cut-up’ technique: an algorithm for writing lyrics that he was already doing by hand. You take sentences from completely different places, cut them into bits and combine them in new ways. The randomness in the algorithm creates strange combinations of ideas and he would use ones that caught his attention, sometimes building whole songs around the ideas they expressed.
Tools for creativity
Rather than being an algorithm that is creative in itself, it is perhaps more a tool to help people (or perhaps other algorithms) be more creative. Both kinds of algorithm are of course useful. It does help highlight an issue with any “creative algorithm”, whether creating new art, music or writing. If the algorithm produces lots of output and a human then chooses the ones to keep (and show others), then where is the creativity? In the algorithm or in the person? That selection process of knowing what to keep and what to discard (or keep working on) seems to be a key part of creativity. Any truly creative program should therefore include a module to do such vetting of its work!
All that, aside, an algorithm is certainly part of the reason Bowie’s song lyrics were often so surreal and intriguing!
Write a cut-up technique program
Why not try and write your own cut-up technique program to produce lyrics. You will likely need to use String processing libraries of whatever language you choose. You could feed it things like the text of webpages or news reports. If you don’t program yet, do it by hand cutting up magazines, shuffling the part sentences before gluing them back together.
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This blog is funded by UKRI, through grant EP/W033615/1.
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