Category Archive: June 2011

« May 2011 | Main | July 2011 »

June 13, 2011

Meaning Machine

A few years ago, I wrote a little program called "Generator" that extracts all the unique words from any text file you choose, then serves up random combinations of those words, a few at a time.

The point was to prick my imagination with unexpected word juxtapositions, to use them as seeds for writing, and for generating creative associations and amplifications of my own. On that level, it has worked beautifully. But, it's also proved interesting in another, unexpected way. It's given me a new appreciation for the degree to which our minds are "meaning machines."

We create meaning at every opportunity. We see logic and significance in random circumstance, the Virgin Mary in a stained plaster wall, gods and goddesses in the stars. Playing with tools/toys like Generator teases this part of my mind into action.

Of course, as you might expect, many of the phrases the program produces are complete nonsense:

- infant variety "scored"
- duck no entirely...
- ball, daze, cover.
- floating owner? interrupting

(NOTE: All examples in this post are the output of the Generator program, three words at a time, chosen randomly from the same text file. Punctuation and capitalization are retained from the original context, providing an added dimension.)

And many — in fact, surprisingly many — phrases can be parsed in a sensible way:

- flower IS grow
- sick, worn.. world
- Dusty little.. home..
- butt ate countryside
- insensitive bystander sharing

Some of the sensible phrases operate less as grammatically correct sentences and more as a form of shorthand or summary of a possible situation:

- bike.. oops.. smack
- afterlife, everything Yes,
- self-conscious heads, socially
- warm, fingers.. hello.
- mess.. hostile couple.
- being? boundaries returning
- disrepair?.. society struggling

Phrases like these, in particular, are high-octane fuel for my meaning machine.. My mind immediately kicks into gear, jamming and riffing, filling in an entire scene or setting for each phrase.

Then there are the phrases that fall somewhere between sense and nonsense, which act on my mind in an entirely different fashion:

- thrill, obviously cultish
- pleased "hollow" painful,
- flowers sounds... shut
- escape dead-end awake.

These fascinate me. They aren't, strictly speaking, meaningful.. but they feel as though they could mean something. It’s a semantic grey zone, where associations and metaphors and images are open-ended. As seeds for further writing, these borderline phrases are more challenging, because they make me do more of the heavy lifting — not always productive from a songwriting perspective, but always good exercise.

Really, though, it's often enough to just let the random phrases flow past, and see how my mind reacts. Regardless of where a given phrase might fall on the sense-nonsense spectrum, I love being able to directly observe a process that is usually unconscious: my mind doing its best to make sense of the world.

I could wax philosophical about all of this, but not today. For now, I'll leave you with a few more random phrases... See what your meaning machine makes of these:

- sleep? half here?
- wedding? kiss disabled
- directions.. shark buffet
- bath misunderstanding enjoyed,
- exhausted, selfish, lately...
- deficient old layer
- chair, beckons dust

Posted by richard at 11:41 AM