Tra-la-lyrics: an approach to generate text based on rhythm

Abstract

This paper is about an ongoing project, Tra-la-Lyrics which aims to create a computer program capable of gen- erating lyrics for given melodies. As a preliminary phase, the correlations between words and rhythm in a song’s lyrics was studied and some heuristics were achieved. Al- gorithms for syllabic division and syllabic stress identifi- cation on a word were implemented. A method for cal- culating the strength of each beat of a melody was also used. The actual system’s architecture is described. To get the contents of the lyrics we’ve used a relational database where we could find not only the words, but also their grammatical category and some morphological related at- tributes. Some ongoing work is also referred and some examples of the currently possible outputs of the system are presented. Conclusions and possible further work are finally discussed.