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Fixed Mobile Handsets Special Feature

Dance like a monkey

18 December 2006
Telecoms Special Features

Most people are familiar with the infinite monkey theorem in some way shape or form, the most common being something like "due to the nature of infinity, a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard will almost surely recreate a chosen text, such as the works of William Shakespeare."

Quite what this has to do with the 'Infinite Monkey Project EP', backed by the creators of the T9 dictionary software, Tegic, is anybody's guess. Nevertheless, that's their hook for releasing an EP of randomly generated lyrics against a background of music generated by "Europe's burgeoning new musical talent".

Whereas "almost surely" in the context of the infinite monkey theorem is a mathematical term with a specific meaning and the 'monkey' is not an actual monkey but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces a random sequence of letters, T9 got the general public to stand in for the monkeys by texting in their own words.

Words were then collected and phrases were formed. Artists then short listed sentences to create lyrics and a final song. These artists were discovered after T9 went "trawling through Europe's burgeoning new musical talent."

Italian/English artist Sparo seems to be one of the main contributors, delivering "a diverse collection of hip hop, beats, breaks, guitars and good old fashioned songs, with a generous dash of odd-ball sci-fi thrown in for good measure."

Good news for the texters themselves, if the song becomes a hit with your credited word in it, you will receive a royalty cheque. But much like the infinite monkey theorem itself, this feat would likely require infinite time.

Our intrepid reporter also hopes that the contributors to the programme behaved better than the monkeys in one particular experiment. We discovered that in 2003, a group from the University of Plymouth won a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to leave a keyboard in a monkey enclosure in Paignton Zoo, England, for a month. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages, interestingly consisting largely of the letter S, they started by attacking the keyboard with a stone and continued by urinating and defecating on it.

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