
Compasses
"Compasses" is a chapbook recently published in Andreas Bülhoff's sync series. It consists of poems produced with the help of a machine learning model I designed as the next step in my exploration of phonetic similarity. This model has two parts: a "speller," which spells words based on how they sound, and a "sounder-out," which sounds out words based on how they're spelled. In the process of sounding out a word, the "sounder-out" produces a fixed-length numerical vector, known as a "hidden state," which is essentially a condensed representation of a word's phonetics. The "speller" can then use the phonetic information contained in this hidden state to produce a plausible spelling of the word. In "Compasses," I used this model to generate new imaginary words that exist in the negative phonetic spaces between the phonetic hidden states corresponding to names of members of well-known quartets.