Automatic generation of lyrics parodies

Altering the lyrics of famous songs is a common creative and communicative act, often used for purposes that go beyond simple amusement, such as the creation of companion music for advertisements. In this case, the altered song commonly refers to the advertised product or idea. Here we present a system that can automatically reproduce this process: it starts from a novel text, i.e. the daily news, identifies the key concepts therein contained, expands them and then uses this word cloud to replace some of the words in a song, obeying lexical, metrical and rhyming constraints. The new song is then created by merging these new lyrics, sung by a speech synthesizer, with the original backing music. Our evaluation shows that songs created by the system increase the recall of the news they were created from.