Sonifying Letter Frequencies: Generating Chord Sequences from Text
Donald Spector

Proceedings of Bridges 2023: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Culture
Pages 537–540
Short Papers

Abstract

As part of an ongoing project to consider the representation of various structures in music, I explore aspects of turning ordinary text into musical forms. Ultimately, the approach of greatest interest is one inspired, in broad terms, by Huffman coding: creating a sonic encoding that reflects the frequency of the characters. However, rather than associating letter frequency with duration of the corresponding notes (as a Huffman coding might do), we use a method motivated by the tonalité moderne: we pick a key, and encode frequent letters with chords that are harmonically closely related to the tonic chord of the key, while less frequent letters are associated with harmonically more distant chords. This paper is intended both as a consideration of how to conceive of an effective sonification of text, and as a proof of concept, presenting the methodology and sample outcomes, so that this methodology might find broader use.

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