Why Classic Poetry?
We live in an age of unprecedented distraction. Endless notifications, infinite scrolling, and constant noise pull our attention in a thousand directions at once. In contrast, the great poets of the past lived with far fewer distractions. They sat with their thoughts, observed the world deeply, and distilled human experience into something timeless.
That’s why we turn to classic poetry.
These works were written when music and poetry were largely separate art forms for a brief, but very significant, period in human history. Poetry stood on its own as the highest expression of language, emotion, and philosophy.
The struggles, joys, follies, and truths these poets witnessed centuries ago continue to echo loudly in our own time. Pairing their words with modern music revealed to me just how relevant that wisdom still is.
The Poetry That Prompts The Music
Full list of all the original poetry and tracks. Read any of the original poems which are the lyrics used for the song and comprise the largest portion of the AI prompts. Complete with links to the Spotify for any poem you want to hear The Timeless Ones rendition of.
The Poets
The Timeless Ones built AI art models of all frequently used poets. Incorporating AI artwork as a signature for, and enhancement to, the poetic tracks.
Here you can find a little background on each poet and links to Spotify playlists for just their specific poetry.
About The Timeless Ones
Having spent multiple decades in the technology side of education working with everything from servers to DMX lighting. These tracks are an experiment, originally created just for myself, to feel the emotional depth that modern music adds. A few friends, and my own obsession, convinced me to share. I consider this project to be a novel new type of poetry reading created through a collaboration between myself, a great poet, and multiple AIs represented by Robot Shakespeare.
About The Process
Terminus
The process begins with doing research into both the poem and the poet. What is the poem about? How did the poet view that particular topic? What imagery is the poet attempting to invoke? Are there particular musical instruments or styles that might fit the theme?
For example, Emerson's poem "Terminus" likens the journey of growing old to that of a sailing vessel traveling the rough ocean to a desirable destination. The epic rock ballad ended up feeling right and sounding good for that poem. The addition of both a tin whistle and concertina subtly add to the theme of life's journey as a voyage we can use Emerson's wisdom to help navigate.
A Strange Wild Song
Music and poetry have both an emotional mood and intensity. Getting the track's mood to match or play off the poetry while cranking up the emotional intensity is the goal. While any style can be used to generate an emotion, some genres of music lend themself more naturally to some emotions.
In this example using Lewis Carroll's poem "A Strange Wild Song" I used a ska sound for the music while giving the vocals a hint of 80's comedy rap. Lewis Carroll was famous for his "non sense" poetry and this style of music leans into that giving it that silly feel.
The Widow At Windsor
My process typically takes at least 10 iterations and some top 50. When you prompt the AI and get a response (ie. a new original song), you get critical feedback for how the AI is interpreting your prompt. Starting with generic styles and tags, the prompt is tweaked until the style and melodies match the feeling of the poetry. Which does have a fair amount of subjectivity to it.
It took well over 50 iterations for Kipling's "The Widow at Windsor". Poets of that era wrote poetry intending them to be turned into music. Getting it to have an Imperial sounding beat and horn took some iterations. But, the real challenge was the lines intended to be said by a crowd of "poor beggars", ie. the subjects of a Queen who loved imperial expansion. Instead of using the words "poor beggars" in the track, I wanted an actual choir of peasants for those lines. Tweaking the prompting to get that choir I listened to over 100 AI generated tracks changing the prompt every 2-4 tracks.
This is one I plan to revisit in the future, as I have since added a few other steps to the process both in different ways to use the AIs and various editing tools.
Loss And Gain (The Arrow and the song)
My favorite discovery thus far was that poets tend to have poems that echo the same emotion and theme, some even use the same metaphorical imagery. Few things have ever made me as happy as combining these two Longfellow poems into one song. The themes of both poems match right down to the arrow as a metaphor for actions taken in life.
Whenever you see a poem name in parenthesis, it has been used for the chorus in whatever style combo I settled on, or arrived at, as matching the emotion of the poem and sounding like something I would listen to on repeat (which I did and do). Quite often I end up with more than one and publish those as well.
In the newer singles these fusions are given an original name with the accompanied artwork showing the full names of all poems used.
Spoils of the Dead
I learned early that depending on the parameters given to the AI, it would occasionally stray from the lyrics given. The AI is merely creating the "optimum sound" based on the inputs it received, so I try to learn from how it interprets the poem and prompts. To make a poet's words fit a particular style I will allow, or even ask, the AI to reuse a word, or line, or Stanza(s) outside of the original structure of the poem so long as the original structure remains intact.
Many styles of modern music rely on a Chorus or Refrain. In this example from Robert Frost's "Spoils of the Dead" his last Stanza sums up the emotion of the whole poem which is a short story of two faeries stumbling across a dead body. That last Stanza gave a perfect way to break up the verse of the story and wasn't removed from its original placement. But, it could be argued that allowing that last Stanza to be spoiled (lol) midway through the poem is changing the work. I consider it to be using the musical style to leverage the poets message and emotion. That last Stanza clearly summed up the message Frost was invoking with his story, but what do you think when you listen?
The idea of adding even more AI to this process was irresistible. Models of the poet lyricists and the project mascot (Robot Shakespeare) started serving as a signature, acknowledgement of the poet, and a way to give playful context to the poem's imagery.
"Nobody's Selective Auction" combines 3 Emily Dickinson poems into one track. The names of all 3 can be found in the artwork as seen here. The artwork itself emphasizing the common message (praising anonymity) with the imagery of frogs admiring from their bog.