About Songpoem

A song poem refers usually to song lyrics which have been set to music for a fee. This practice, also known more romantically as song sharking, was most common during the 20th century in North America.[1] It is generally thought that this was, to all intents and purposes, a scam – people were deceived into paying money to have a poem or set of lyrics they had written set to music, perhaps with promises that it would be promoted and distributed once recorded, although in reality, no such efforts were made.

Song-poems were created on an assembly line, with the composition, arranging and recording being quickly and methodically rushed through the studio. For those who are interested, there has been some interest in the songpoem recently, and several complilations of songpoems have been released.[2][3][4]

Teaching a computer to write music makes an interesting comparison with the songpoem, however, as not all songwriting is drawn of pure inspiration. The theory is, that with a good understanding of the basic rules of songwriting and the form of songs, you can write songs by numbers. Of course, the inspiration is a key part, and so we may end up with results of varying quality.

The Design

The songpoem program writes music based on three things:

  1. User Input
  2. Songwriting Rules And Form
  3. Random Elements (Simulation of Inspiriation :) )

First of all, a song structure is selected, in terms of the phrasing (each verse and chorus is written as a combination of question and answer phrases); then chords are written for each bar. A melody is applied over the top, with a melodic rhythm designed to fit the number of the syllables in the inputted lyrics.

Once the song is written, the script outputs a midi file with karoake-lyrics and a simple backing track (Drums, Piano (simple 3 part harmony), Bass (always plays the root) & Voice). You'll need Vanbascos Midi Player or something similar to view the yrics when you play it back.

The program is implemented as several PHP Classes, the main Songwriter class of which extends the Midi Class by Valentin Schmidt[5].

How To Use Songpoem

It's pretty easy! First go to the Home Page and fill in the form to get started, You just need to choose a couple of settings - the mood (how happy), tempo, how many verses you want and whether you want a chorus. Fill the data in and hit the button.

On the next page, you add some lyrics, a verse and chorus (if you wanted one). Verse and chorus are restricted to four lines, as this gives up as good number of possible question / answer phrase combinations, but apart from that you can have as many words as you want. It's important to remember that you need to separate words into their syllables using hy-phens (e.g. sep-ar-ate words in-to their sy-lla-bles) otherwise the program will just assign one word to each note.

If you want more verses, then on the next page you'll need to enter some more lyrics. Be careful to make sure then have the same number of syllables as the other verses or else your lyrics may not fit the tune quite as you'd hoped.

Once that's all done, you'll be able to download it as a midi file. Vanbascos Midi Player is the best player I know of to play back the music so you can see the lyrics - it's free too. I'd recommend getting that first.

Make sure you download a copy of the song if you want to hear it again, as it may only be available for 10 minutes (songs older than 10 minutes are periodically deleted to save space).

If you don't like the output, feel free to refresh the page (F5 for most Windows Browsers, or click the reload link), which will write you another song based on the same input.

The Author

Songpoem was designed and conceived by Roy Fox, a web designer and keen songwriter and composer. Read more about me at my own website www.royfox.co.uk

  1. Wikipedia: Songpoem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songpoem
  2. Off The Charts: The Songpoem Story (Amazon) http://www.amazon.com/Off-Charts-Song-Poem-Song-Poems/dp/B00016XO6K/
  3. The American Songpoem Anthology (emusic) http://www.emusic.com/artist/11694/11694148.html
  4. songpoemmusic.com: Compilations http://www.songpoemmusic.com/comps.htm
  5. Midi Class http://staff.dasdeck.de/valentin/midi/