T Campbell's Blog

I've finished dialoguing Divalicious except for the song lyrics. Still six songs to go.

To that end, I'm trying out MasterWriter and so far I'm not all that impressed. Its rhyming dictionary itself is excellent, way better than RhymeZone or Rhymer, and there's not much wrong with its dictionary proper, but the thesaurus is a half-assed affair and the other features are either hackneyed or seem to have nothing to do with songwriting. Allegedly this is a top-of-the-line product, used by songwriters like Rob Thomas and Trent Reznor; certainly the competitors don't look any better. So why is its tech so lame?

I don't care what O'Reilly says: it doesn't flow. You keep losing visual contact with the song you're composing, which should be central to the experience at all times. The rival program Rhyme & Verse has a much better interface, but makes up for it by having no dictionary or thesaurus at all.

Both of these programs are little more than their rhyming dictionaries, and sorry, but that's just not good enough. Would it really be that difficult to set up a "Rhythm Finder" that automatically counted and bolded the syllables of lines as you wrote them, so you could keep a poem in iambic pentameter or a song in whatever rhythm you had chosen?

Then there's the ease with which I stump them just by mentioning "Shanna." Like you and I can't figure out any words that rhyme with THAT. Would it be SO hard to work up a little A.I. intuition to help the program along when it encounters such words? (Of course it would be stumped occasionally-- English has at least seven different pronunciations for words that end in the string "ough"-- but for something like "Shanna" it's a simple question: does it rhyme with "banana" or "botswana?" And other words like "Jay-Z" are even more obvious.)

For that matter, why can't we add our own words to this rhyming dictionary? If we could, we users could refine it over a period of years into the kind of tool that we'd just have to upgrade instead of replacing with a competitor's model. This makes commercial sense, right? And if we ruin the dictionary, that's our lookout.

And good as MasterWriter's rhyming dictionary is, do you know what would be even better? A macro that fastened onto the dictionaries in OneLook that had pronunciation guides, converted all words into their raw pronunciations (you know, with schwas and emphasis marks), grouped them by rhymes and then converted them back. If you could apply such a macro to a large collection of words like the dictionary in Microsoft Word (a dictionary that you *can* add words to, if you so choose) then hey presto, INSTANT rhyming dictionary. Or if you applied the macro to sort by sentences instead of words, then you could do cool things like this with all kinds of digital text, including OhNoRobot data. Why hasn't anyone done this yet?

(And if they have, why don't I know about it?)

Come on! It's 2006! The future is now! Chop, chop!

More! Better!