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Babble is a system for authoring mechanistic sound poetry. It occupies a space between speech and music, allowing play with the structure and form of simplified phonetics. The visitor is encouraged to enter nonsense verse, which is then immediately played back as synthesised sound. Although babble's phonetic system is quite unlike that of any natural language, when faced with the text that generates the sound, the listener has the sensation of 'hearing' speech. Babble is written in the open source HaXe language, which compiles to javascript and flash. The source code is available under the GNU Public License version 3 or later.

Alex McLean is a programmer and live coding musician. He is co-founder of the dorkbot london meetings on electronic art, the TOPLAP organisation for the proliferation of live algorithm programming, and the runme software art repository. He is also a PhD student at Goldsmiths College, within the Intelligent Sound and Music Systems group.

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