The love poems in this carousel are all found in the public domain--they are not protected by copyright and are free to use without permission. I put together the collection because I wanted to set the love poems to music (computer-generated music, that is) and I didn't want to violate copyrights.
My original plan was to have my computer write and sing songs using lyrics from each love poem, but I soon discovered that generating one minute of song required the better part of a day. I decided instead to generate a song for just one poem--and just how ever many lines fit into one minute of music.
I chose Helen Hay Whitney's With Music, as it seemed like a good fit, and used Kevin MacLeod's "Ukelele Song" to kick things off--the first 10 seconds of the below piece are written by a human. The computer takes it from there...
The lyrics are unclear, but much better than in the other two versions generated. I include those tracks below, as well as more details for anyone interested in learning more about how the song was made. In the meantime, my husband Dave--who had not read the poem--offered to transcribe what he heard:
For this project, I decided to try OpenAI's JukeBox, "a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles." I spent some time browsing the samples the AI made in a variety of genres and in the style of various artists, and settled on Abba/Pop as the sound I was hoping for.
To use the JukeBox model, I followed the instructions Marconan shared on Medium and used the coresponding notebook on Google Colab.
Here are the other two tracks:
With Music (version b)
With Music (version c-- somewhat punk?)
I hope you enjoy the public domain carousel! And the songs, of course. More carousels and projects here.