Software for Poets (Was: Re: Text-to-speech)

[Francis Girard]

Hello M. Hartman,

It's a very big opportunity for me to find someone that both is a poet and 
knows something about programming.

First, please excuse my bad english ; I'm a french canadian.

I am dreaming to write a software to help french poets to write strict 
rigourous classical poetry. Since calssical poetry is somewhat mathematical, 
a lot of tasks can be automatised :

1- Counting the number of syllabs ("pied" in french) in a verse

2- Checking the rimes ; determining the strength of a rime

3- Checking compliance of a poem to a fixed pre-determined classical form (in 
french, we have distique, tercet, quatrain, quintain, sixain, huitain, 
dizain, triolet, vilanelle, rondeau, rondel, ballade, chant royal, sonnet, 
etc.)

4- Propose a synonym that will fit in a verse, i.e. with the right amount of 
syllabs

5- Suggest a missing word or expression in a verse by applying the Shannon 
text generation principle

First, do you think it may be a useful tool ?
What other features you think can make it usefull for a poet ?

The first task of cutting sentences into syllabs (phonetically of course, not 
typographically) is already done. It's been difficult to get it right and to 
make it guess correctly with a very very high percentage. 

I can very well imagine that the next task is even more difficult. I need to 
translate text into phonems. Do you know some software that does it ? I guess 
that voice synthetisers that translates written text into spoken text must 
first translate the text into phonems. Right ? Do you know if there some way 
that I can re-use some sub-modules from these projects that will translate 
text into phonems ?

Regards,

Francis Girard

Le dimanche 20 Mars 2005 04:40, Charles Hartman a écrit :
> Does anyone know of a cross-platform (OSX and Windows at least) library
> for text-to-speech? I know  there's an OSX API, and probably also for
> Windows. I know PyTTS exists, but it seems to talk only to the Windows
> engine. I'd like to write a single Python module to handle this on both
> platforms, but I guess I'm asking too much -- it's too hardware
> dependent, I suppose. Any hints?
>
> Charles Hartman
> Professor of English, Poet in Residence
> http://cherry.conncoll.edu/cohar
> http://villex.blogspot.com