[Kevin Greene]

Has anyone seen one of these that actually worked? The whole matter seems technically possible, but certainly not easy, and I wonder if anyone has invested the time, energy, and money to make it happen.

[R. Nemo Hill]

It seems the height of folly to me.

It's hard enough to de-mechanize meter in composition: to find it deep within language, rather than impose it from without.

Nemo

[Erik Olson]

What Nemo said.

[Kevin Greene]

Nemo, I agree with you entirely. There is a certain magic to it.

Which leads us to the question: Why do we often critique poems as though they were watches?

[Erik Olson]

You mean this?

But most by numbers judge a poet’s song,
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong:
In the bright Muse tho’ thousand charms conspire,
Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire,

Mr. Pope

I think the technical aspects are but one part of the whole that ought to be considered and that it would be silly to only focus on them to the exclusion of everything else. As that would be treating the poem as though it were but a watch.

[Kevin Greene]

Erik, that's wonderfully apt!

(I wish I knew more Pope.)

[Michael Cantor]

Originally Posted by Kevin Greene

I wonder if anyone has invested the time, energy, and money to make it happen.

Why should anybody want to bother, unless they were more interested in tricks and gimmicks than poetry. It you're a poet you search within yourself and you do your best to create poetry. If you're a phony, you find an app.

[Max Goodman]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

Why should anybody want to bother, unless they were more interested in tricks and gimmicks than poetry.

The interest would be in the programming and analysis. Whether it's possible to write a program that could sort through all the variables and identify a rhythm of stresses in a text is an intriguing question.

I can't picture a use a poet might make of such an app, but it's not impossible. Rhyming dictionaries help those who rhyme, and they do so without in any way removing the art from rhyming well.

[Matt Q]

If you want to play with one, try Scandroid; it's free to download. It does pretty well, but problems arise, inevitably, when the sense of the phrase determines which word or syllable the stress falls.

[R. S. Gwynn]

I would think that the visual of a .wav file would be interesting. I see these on the internet all the time accompanying recordings of poems, etc. Fussell mentions three kinds of scansion: graphic, musical, and acoustic. When he wrote Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, the last of these was in a fairly primitive state. I would be interested in seeing some examples of various meters in this acoustic/graphic format.