Sing when your coding

My Spaceman was Pele and I liked the way in which he controlled the play of the Brazilian team. When we visted the Torpoint Ferry, I focused on the guy who directed the cars onto the ferry. Looking at both of them, it seemed to me that they followed conditional statements; “If first car then send it down the 2nd row”. Because of that, I looked into using code to control and map your actions. From there I started to look into code poems and in particular poems written in Perl. One that I especially liked was the conversion into Perl of the Jabberwocky. Not only does it stay pretty faithful to the original, but the code is also functional. When executing and it reaches one of the warnings, the script spawns a sub-process. It’s almost as if it’s saying “I did warn you about them”. Because of that poem I decided that whatever it was that I made, not only should it read well, but the visuals and its functionality should also be part of it. I also decided to use Processing instead of Perl. Although traditionally code poems seem to be written in Perl, it has been a long time since I last used it and I am VERY rusty.

I turned my attention back to football and decided to produce something using football chants. Although to the casual observer they’re nothing more than words yelled by grown men who probably should know better, they have as much structure as any software code or poem. A 2 line rhyming chant about the Plymouth Argyle left-back and a member of the opposing side set to “La donna mobile” from the Rigoletto must surely help to prove that. Because chants are as much about the opposite set of fans as it is the match, I decided to have 2 scripts “chanting” at each other as well as random elements such as fouls or goals being scored to help to mix it up.

A short video of the scripts in action is below along with a zip file containing the 2 scripts.

Watch video 16.1MB

Download code