“Song of the Synonym” was a performance based around some code I wrote to create a rhythmic, chant-like chorus from written poetry. Using an online thesaurus and the voice of Google’s translator, the code finds alternative meanings for each line and cycles through them while monotonously chanting the original line.

On the bottom of the video, you can see me feeding each line of the poem to the program one at a time, like punchcards to an early computer, or food to a hungry but inefficient beast.

The poem in this video is an excerpt from an English translation of Verlaine’s “Marine.”