To Sing like a Mockingbird

Musical parody, i.e. the act of changing the lyrics of an existing and very well-known song, is a commonly used technique for creating catchy advertising tunes and for mocking people or events. Here we describe a system for automatically producing a musical parody, starting from a corpus of songs. The system can automatically identify characterizing words and concepts related to a novel text, which are taken from the daily news. These concepts are then used as seeds to appropriately replace part of the original lyrics of a song, using metrical, rhyming and lexical constraints. Finally, the parody can be sung with a singing speech synthesizer, with no intervention from the user.