Tra-la-Lyrics: An approach to generate text based on rhythm

This paper is about an ongoing project, Tra-la-Lyrics which aims to create a computer program capable of generating 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. Algorithms for syllabic division and syllabic stress identification on a word were implemented. A method for calculating 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 attributes. 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.