Daniel Villagran
Nick Montfort
Wasalu Jaco
We describe Cyber Ear / Cypher Ear, CE/CE (pronounced “Ceecee”) for short, a system for automatically evaluating improvisational, responsive rap in real time. By explicitly modeling freestyle rap appreciation, the system allows us to learn more about different aspects of this type of rap, including which ones are hard to formalize and which ones are more easily modeled computationally. Thus, this system allows us to formulate a novel theory of rap appreciation, and explore how it relies on semantic, phonetic, and lexical connections. One of the significant and difficult aspects of this type of rap is semantic connection. We compare different techniques for assessing the semantic aspects of improvisational rap and provide a preliminary assessment of these methods. We find that WordNet appears to work the best in our current implementation.
From the Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition
