The Muses of Poetry
The Muses of Poetry is an interactive installation that explores how interactive animated characters can transmit the intrinsic emotions conveyed in poems to an audience, expanding in this way the act of reciting poetry. It goes a step forward in the computational creativity direction by bringing into existence a Virtual Poetry Interpreter.
The combination of semantic analysis, real-time graphics, Text-to-Speech, Automatic-Speech-Recognition and human-computer interaction gives as a result an almost autonomous system. Given that no pre-recorded animations are needed, each time a new poem is added, the characters will be able to recite it while producing their animations on the fly. The affective content of the poems is transmitted through facial expressions, or visual cues, and voice rhythm.
The user can interact with the character by selecting two words that appeared together with the displayed Muse. These words help the character to decide for a poem that will be read in an emotional way.
Poems
The poems in the Muses of Poetry were used with the written permission of the authors, who were contacted through Kent MacCarter, Managing Editor of the online magazine Cordite Poetry Review.
This is a list of the poems recited during the exhibitions of the installation. Some of them are recited by 2 or more characters.