Harmonia Poeta
When a poem becomes a memory passed between strangers
Harmonia Poeta begins with text-to-music generation but moves toward a more public question: can a technical system help people slow down and listen to one another? Poetry research, musical analysis and interaction design meet inside a red telephone booth that carries one visitor’s reading into the next person’s experience.
The Question Behind the Work
The project is not asking whether AI can write music alone.
A spoken poem contains rhythm, stress, emotion and memory, but those qualities do not translate into music automatically. Every mapping from language to sound involves a choice about what matters and what can be left behind.
Harmonia Poeta makes that translation part of a social encounter. The generated music does not end with the person who reads. It becomes an atmosphere inherited by the next visitor, turning individual expression into a fragile public memory.
Following the Research
Following poetry from historical form to computational signal
Narrative-poetry history, literary rhythm and contemporary generative models are placed on one research path. The project asks how poetic form can remain meaningful when it becomes data for a musical system.
Poetry Carries Time
A chronological study follows narrative poetry across Latin and English traditions, showing how meter, repetition and performance organize collective memory.
Rhythm Becomes Data
The system reads syllabic stress, rhythmic density and emotional tone as inputs for percussion, tempo and instrumentation.
Generation Becomes a Workflow
Separate modules for melody, structure and mixing keep the stages of translation visible instead of presenting one unexplained output.
From an Idea to a Form
How can a private act of reading become a public encounter?
A red telephone booth creates a sheltered listening room in the city. Visitors select a poem, read it aloud and receive an AI-generated soundtrack shaped by the reading.
The soundtrack then remains for the next person. This ‘memory transfer’ mechanism replaces direct social exchange with a slower chain of attention, where strangers encounter one another through traces rather than profiles.
The music does not belong only to the reader; it becomes a trace waiting for the next listener.
The Work
Why It Matters
Why this project matters
Harmonia Poeta matters because it evaluates generative technology through the quality of the relationship it creates. The project shifts AI music away from speed and novelty toward attention, inheritance and the possibility of shared urban listening.