It Do the Poets in Different Voices
Generative AI Voices, the Uncanny, and the Poetry Audio Archive
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2024.i24.1562Keywords:
Poetry, Sound studies, AI, Voice, AudioAbstract
This paper examines the advent of poetry performed by generative-AI voices. It proposes that these synthetic voices can cast a new light on literary historical understandings of the original performances through their minute differences. In places where the AI fails to fully achieve verisimilitude, there can be an “uncanny valley” effect, which allows listeners to hear the original performances anew, defamiliarized in the Russian Formalist sense of the term. The paper goes on to propose a phonetic comparison between the AI voices and the human voices they were trained on. By identifying a number of prosodic differences, the paper posits why the AI voice may sound similar but not quite right, leading to the uncanny effect. The intent of this machine-aided close listening is to further discuss the nuances of the human performances and their literary historical contexts, highlighting how the AI voice can support analyses of the original author performances.
References
Anderson, Catherine, et al. Essentials of Linguistics, Second Edition. Hamilton: McMasters University, 2018. https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/essentialsoflinguistics2/. All websites last visited on 11/12/2024.
Baudelaire, Charles. “Au Lecteur.” 1857. Selected Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal: A Bilingual Edition. Trans. Norman R. Shapiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/039250.html.
Baraka, Amiri. “Poem for Half-White College Students.” Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961-1967. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1969.
Bernstein, Charles. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
---. “Thank You for Saying Thank You.” Girly Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 7-9.
---. “Thank You for Saying Thank You.” Philadelphia: PennSound, 2003: 0:48-1:30. http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bernstein/9-25-03_UPenn/Bernstein-Charles_02_Thank-You-for-Saying_9-25-03_Penn.mp3.
---. Topsy-Turvey. Philadelphia: PennSound, 2021: 37.15-37:50. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Bernstein/Topsy-Turvy/Bernsten-Charles_Topsy-Turvey_Audible.mp3.
Bernstein, Charles and Davide Balula. Poetry Has No Future Unless It Comes to an End: Poems of Artificial Intelligence. Rome: Nero Press, 2023.
---. “I am the Shadow of the Poet Charles Bernstein.” Poetry Has No Future Unless It Comes to an End: Poems of Artificial Intelligence. Philadelphia: PennSound, 2023a: 0:00-0:30. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Balula/AI/tracks/Balula-Bernstein_p26_I_Am_the_Shadow_of_Poet_Charles_Bernstein_01-03-2023.mp3.
---. “Story Continues Below Advertisement.” Poetry Has No Future Unless It Comes to an End: Poems of Artificial Intelligence. Philadelphia: PennSound, 2023b: 0:45-1:15. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Balula/AI/tracks/Balula-Bernstein_p84_
Story_Continues_Below_Advertisement_01-03-2023.mp3.
Colonna, Valentina. Voices of Italian Poets. Storia e analisi fonetica della lettura della poesia italiana del Novecento. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2022.
Colonna, Valentina, Antonio Pamies Bertrán and Stefano Damato. “Towards a Phonetic History of the Voices of Spanish Poets: A First Experimental Study on the Generation of ‘27.” Journal of Experimental Phonetics 33.1 (2024): 7-34. https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/experimentalphonetics/article/view/46106.
Coscarelli, Joe. “An A.I. Hit of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music World.” The New York Times 19 April 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/arts/music/ai-drake-the-weeknd-fake.html.
Eidsheim, Nina Sun and Katherine Meizel, edited by. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. [Online edition https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199982295.001.0001.]
Eliot, T. S. The Speech Lab Recordings. 1935. Edited by Chris Mustazza. Philadelphia: PennSound, 2023. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Eliot.php.
---. The Waste Land. 1922. Project Gutenberg, 1998. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1321/pg1321-images.html.
Feaster, Patrick. “‘Uncle Josh Stories’: Cal Stewart’s Other Book (1924).” Griffonage-Dot-Com 7 January 2021. https://griffonagedotcom.wordpress.com/2021/01/07/uncle-josh-stories-cal-stewarts-other-book-1924/.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021.
Liberman, Mark. “God’s Own Englishman with a Tube Up His Nose.” Language Log 23 April 2007. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004436.html.
Mori, Masahiro, Karl F. MacDorman and Norri Kageki. “The Uncanny Valley [From the Field].” IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 19.2 (2012): 98-100.
McEnaney, Tom. “This American Voice: The Odd Timbre of a New Standard in Public Radio.” The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies. Edited by Nina Sun Eidsheim and Katherine Meizel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. [Online edition https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199982295.001.0001.]
Mustazza, Chris. “In Search of the Sermonic: Machine Listening and Poetic Sonic Genre.” Computational Stylistics in Poetry, Prose, and Drama. Edited by Anne-Sophie Bories, Petr Plecháč and Pablo Ruiz Fabo. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023. 87-98.
---. “The Voices We Do.” 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV9INJd0Tlo&t=3s.
MacArthur, Marit J. “Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies.” PMLA 131.1 (2016): 38-63.
Patel, Nilay. “AI Drake just Set an Impossible Legal Trap for Google.” The Verge 19 April 2023. https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/19/23689879/ai-drake-song-google-youtube-fair-use.
PennSound. Philadelphia: PennSound. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/.
Spinelli, Martin and Lance Dann. Podcasting : The Audio Media Revolution. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
Shanfeld, Ethan. “Ghostwriter’s ‘Heart on My Sleeve,’ the AI-Generated Song Mimicking Drake and the Weeknd, Submitted for Grammys.” Variety 6 September 2023. https://variety.com/2023/music/news/ai-generated-drake-the-weeknd-song-submitted-for-grammys-1235714805/.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art, As Device.” Poetics Today 36.3 (2015): 151-174.
Veltman, Chloe. “When You Realise Your Favorite New Song Was Written and Performed by…AI.” NPR 21 April 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/04/21/1171032649/ai-music-heart-on-my-sleeve-drake-the-weeknd.
Wagner, Petra and Simon Betz. “Effects of Meter, Genre and Experience on Pausing, Lengthening and Prosodic Phrasing in German Poetry Reading.” Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2023. 2538-2542. doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2023-1443.
West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society 1.2 (1987): 125-151.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Chris Mustazza
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Iperstoria is an Open Access journal.- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY-NC License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of their work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. We require authors to inform us of any instances of re-publication.
