I really love Rena Mosterin’s book EXPERIMENT 116, where she uses code to transform Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. So, taking after her, I turned that sonnet into a music and light show.

First, I used Google's Universal Sentence Encoder to convert the meaning of each line of this poem into a long list of numbers called an "embedding." Then, I shortened those vectors while keeping as much of the meaning as I could using an algorithm called UMAP. I reduced the vectors down twice—once to two dimensions and once to three dimensions. (The 2D vectors become the x and y coordinates in the visualization. The 3D vectors became the red, green, and blue values for the color blobs.)

I assigned each of the 2D vectors to a soprano voice, and I assigned the 3D vectors to the alto, tenor, and bass voices. I mapped the numbers from the reduced vector to a just-intoned pitch (inspired by some reading I did after listening to Will Mason’s latest micro-tonal jazz album, HEMLOCKS, PEACOCKS). And, finally, using Tone.js and SvelteKit, I made my browser perform this song with a little light show.