When a Shared Link Becomes a Kinetic Poem

Yesterday morning, Terry Elliott shared out a link to a site/app called Patatap, which allows you to make music of a sort by using the keyboard of your computer (or the screen of your mobile device, I guess … I didn’t try that yet). Playing around with the keyboard had me thinking: what if the keys I pressed were not random at all, but were words? What if I made music to say something?

That led to this, as I type in Dogtrax three times. (I used Snagit to do a video capture).

Later, as Terry gave it a try, too, and then Susan and others, I thought: what if we could take a small poem (Susan suggested a haiku) and superimpose the words with the keyboard-music, and maybe add some text? What would that look like as a video?

This is what it looked like, and sounded like …

It was a nifty bit of playing with poetry. How did I do it?

• Wrote the poem (duh) and purposely made it short. I decided that it needed some sort of music theme or tie-in, thus the “meshing of melody” ending.
• Opened up Patatap, and Snagit.
• Began recording, and as I spoke the words of the poem, I typed the words of the poem in Patatap. I think the narration is a bit stilted, as I was trying to find some rhythm to the words and still keep the rhythm of the tapping.
• Saved the video file. Uploaded video to Youtube.
• I then used YouTube video editor to add in “annotations” and that allowed me to layer in the text. I tried not to use every word in the poem. Instead, I was going for ideas, letting the narration move the poem along.
• Finally, I shared it out.
• You try it?

Peace (in the poem),
Kevin