OuLiPo Variations

The original N+7 machine

The N+7 machine was invented in 1961 by Jean Lescure of the French OuLiPo poets. It involves replacing each noun in a poem with the seventh one following it in a dictionary.

My project

Try it out here!

I created some some playful variations on this machine by:

1. Replacing every verb in the poem with the 7th verb after it in the English dictionary
2. Replacing every adjective in the poem with the 7th adjective after it in the English dictionary
3. Replacing every 7th word with a random rhyming word
4. Generating music using every 7 characters of the input poem

Built with the spaCy Python natural language processing library, the Websters English Dictionary as a json file, the DataMuse API for rhymes, Midi.js for the jukebox, and a minimalist Flask application deployed for free on PythonAnywhere.

My original Jupyter notebook exploration is here.

Next steps

This project was created as an enthusiastic extension of our Week 1 homework assignment for the class: “Let’s Play: Wayward Sentences”, taught by Kameelah Janan Rasheed and Shiraz Abdullahi Gallab at the School for Poetic Computation.

Here are some other variations I’d love to implement next:

• The 7th vector embedding
• Using a LLM as an API, such as GPT 3.5, to calculate the 7th most probable word after a given word (Markov Chains!)
• Linking the 7th result in Google for each word