Collective Narrative Week 3: A Machine Listens to This American Life

Instead of creating a new story from scratch for this assignment, I decided to tranform an existing sound piece. After listening to the dissection of Dead Animal Man, I decided to make a sound piece that would reveal the “skeleton” of a story, scrubbing away details to reveal its overall structure. I also wanted to explore the very limited ways in which machines today can understand stories, identifying only surface properties such as main topic or sentiment, but having almost no clue about meaning.

With those goals in mind I processed every sentence in the transcript of “This American Life: The Super” using sentiment analysis and topic modeling to generate a machine description of it. For example, the sentence “they will make a good person bad” was transformed into “short, subjective, very negative sentence by the subject about good person.” The resulting sound piece should give the listener an idea of how a machine would understand the original episode as it’s listening to it in real time.