Interactive Frank An interactive audio montage

Interactive Frank

• An interactive audio montage

Joe Frank

• “Critically acclaimed broadcaster and performance artist …”

• “a master of the dark, humorous and absurd”

• Shows aired on WFMU and NPR

• Series of fictitious narrative monologues, dramas, "real life" phone conversations, and often all of the above

• My inspiration for author model

Charles Marks

• Old grumpy artist

• Ex-girlfriend’s grandfather

• Loved to talk about his past

• Could spout off loosely related anecdotes for hours on end, with minimal input

• Perfect model for interactivizing Joe Frank

Make it Interactive?

• What if the user could guide an Joe Frank-esque audio montage in the same way that I could “guide” my conversations with Mr. Marks?

Jobs

• Author – take input from the user and try to make sense of it

• Actors – communicate with the author and try to say something relevant to the input

• Lenny –Wikipedia
• Oswald - LiveJournal

• DJ (and daemon) – communicate with author and try to play a song from your hard drive that matches the overall theme of the input

Technical Details

• Google API

• FreeTTS (text-to-speech)

• Not so good, but you can set pitch, WPM, style, and its free

• MP3s on your hard drive

• ID3 Tags (blinkenlights) w/help from allmusic.com

• dict.org (especially Moby Thesaurus)

• Wikipedia

• LiveJournal RSS

The Interface

• Accepts input from user

• Currently works only with single adjectives

• Eventually, I would like it to accept sentences, and do some sort of simple analysis of what words are “important”

• eg: surreal, uplifting, horrible, sublime, etc.

Meanwhile…

• When you start up the program, the DJ begins searching your hard drive.

• When it encounters an MP3, it checks the ID3 tags

• DJ keeps track of Artists with lists of “moods”, and songs by that artist

• Moods are expanded using thesaurus

Themes

• When you enter a word, a “theme” is constructed.

• The Theme consults dict.org and retrieves synonyms

• When there is more than one valid theme, the Author goes to work

• The themes are the primary narrative guide

The Author

• The Author analyzes the Themes created by the user

• Whenever there is an intersection between two themes, we have encountered something important (a focus)

• These foci are what is handed to the DJ and the Actors as “inspiration”

The Actors

• When the themes have been analyzed, the results are fed to the Actors

• The Actors then take turns reading a line

• The have different sources and different ways of gathering material

Lenny

• Lenny here loves to drop science

• His body of knowledge comes from the WikiPedia

• He finds an article that has something to do with the foci and reads a sentence from it

Oswald

• Oswald is into drama

• He reads from LiveJournal

Modularity

• Authors can be added

• I had to get rid of Fitz (my original character) –he couldn’t get his act together

• Eventually, the authors will have values that will determine when they will say a line.

The DJ

• The DJ is also taking cues from the Author

• He is going through his list of Artists, comparing the “moods” against the foci that the Author has determined

• Once he has found the artist that best matches the themes, he begins to play a song.

• The process starts over when the song has ended

Is it Narrative?

• No

• The result is a disjointed series of sentences, not nearly as cohesive as I want it to be

• What could make it narrative?

• Themes should be influenced by previous input
• Use n-grams
• GoogleAPI should allow more than 1000 queries a day

Then what’s the point?

• I thought that the DJ was remarkable effective.

• Each song he chose was very accurate

• The dialogue was often very entertaining

• I could often fill in the blanks of the dialogue and come up with a cohesive narrative of my own

• With more work, it could definitely get better