David Bowie Lyrics Cutter

Cut poems, your own notes or a whole PDF into strips of paper, shuffle the pile and glue a new lyric together. The cut-up technique Bowie used with scissors on Diamond Dogs and with his Verbasizer on 1. Outside, free, in your browser, no account.

drop a strip here for a new line
Drag strips from the tray onto this mat. Drop one between two strips and the others shift aside; drop below the last line to start a new one.
Bench ready. Put a source on it.

Put a source on the bench

0 of 5 sources

Public domain poems from PoetryDB: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Poe, Blake, Whitman, Shelley and a hundred more. Search by poet or title, or let fate pick one.

    Are you sure?

    How to use the cutter

    1. Source
    Put up to five texts on the bench: a poem from the library, something you type, or a TXT, PDF or DOCX file.
    2. Cut up
    The scissors cut every text into phrases of a few words. The Blade setting makes the pieces finer or coarser.
    3. Drag
    Pull strips from the tray onto the mat. Drop one between two strips and the neighbours shift aside. Drop below the last line for a new line. Drag a strip back to the tray to remove it. On a phone, swipe a strip sideways to grab it, or hold it for a moment and then drag; swiping up or down scrolls the pile.
    4. Export
    Download the lyric as text, as a picture of the mat, or save the whole project as JSON to continue later.
    Keyboard
    Tab to a strip, Enter to move it from the tray to the last line (or back). On the mat: ← → move within the line, ↑ ↓ move to another line, Shift+Enter starts a new line with the strip, Delete returns it to the tray. Ctrl+Z undoes, F toggles fullscreen, W fills the browser window while keeping the browser bar (desktop); inside fullscreen, Fill window and Shrink take you out of fullscreen into that view or back to the page. Esc leaves either.
    Nothing leaves your browser
    Files are read locally. The session is saved in your browser so you can come back later.

    How the Lyrics Cutter works

    1. Pick sourcesUp to five texts: poems from the library, your own notes, or a TXT, PDF or DOCX file.
    2. Cut upThe scissors slice every text into phrases of two to five words and drop hundreds of paper strips in the tray.
    3. Dig and shuffleScroll the pile, search for a word, shuffle for a fresh order, or deal a random line onto the mat.
    4. ArrangeDrag strips onto the mat. They snap into lines, shift aside when you drop one in between, and start a new line below the last one.
    5. ExportLyrics as .txt, a picture of the mat as .png, or the whole project as .json to continue later.

    The cut-up technique, from Tzara to Bowie

    In 1920 Tristan Tzara published a recipe for a Dada poem: take a newspaper article, cut out every word, shake them in a bag and copy them out in the order they come. Around 1959 the painter Brion Gysin sliced through a stack of newspapers in a Paris hotel room, read the halves against each other and showed the result to William S. Burroughs, who turned the accident into a method and used it for novels such as The Soft Machine and Nova Express.

    David Bowie picked it up in the early 1970s. In the 1975 BBC documentary Cracked Actor he sits on a hotel floor cutting lines of his own writing into pieces and rearranging them, and parts of Diamond Dogs were written that way. In the mid 1990s he had Ty Roberts write the Verbasizer, a Mac program that took sentences, chopped them into words and threw new combinations back at him; the lyrics for 1. Outside came partly out of that machine. His point was never to let chance write the song. The cut-up hands you phrases you would not have written yourself, and then you choose.

    This tool is the scissors and the floor. It does not generate words, it only cuts what you give it and lets you move the pieces around.

    What the scissors do to a sentence

    Whole words are dull and whole sentences are too much, so the cutter aims for phrases. First it splits on punctuation and line breaks. Then it reads the remaining long sentences with a small grammar library (compromise.js, loaded in your browser) and cuts between noun groups, verb groups and prepositional groups. Pieces longer than five words are split before a connecting word such as and, with, while, under or because. Pieces shorter than two words are glued to a neighbour, unless the single word is strong enough to stand on its own.

    The fat man eats a lot of pie while walking under the moonlight becomes The fat man eats a lot of pie while walking under the moonlight

    The Blade setting changes the lengths: fine gives one to three words, coarse gives three to eight, and whole lines keeps every line of a poem intact. Each strip also shows a sliver of the line above and below it, cut off at the edge, the way a real clipping does.

    Sources: poetry library, your own text, files

    The poetry library is PoetryDB, an open database of more than 3,000 English poems in the public domain. A bundle of 232 poems by 38 poets is built into the page, so the random button and the browse list work even when PoetryDB is down or you are offline. Searching by poet or title asks PoetryDB live.

    Your own text goes in through a plain text box. Files are read inside your browser: TXT directly, PDF through pdf.js, DOCX through mammoth.js. Nothing is uploaded to this server, and the session (sources, tray and mat) is kept in your browser's local storage so you can close the tab and come back. Up to five sources sit on the bench at once; swap one out when you want new material.

    Questions

    What is the cut-up technique?

    You cut a text into pieces, mix the pieces and read the result as a new text. Tristan Tzara described it for a Dada poem in 1920, Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs made it a method in Paris around 1959, and David Bowie used it for lyrics from Diamond Dogs (1974) onwards, first with scissors and in the 1990s with the Verbasizer, a program written for him by Ty Roberts.

    Is the Bowie Lyrics Cutter free?

    Yes. No account, no payment, no upload of your files to a server. Everything runs in your browser and your session is kept in your browser's local storage until you clear it.

    Which texts can I cut up?

    Public domain poems from PoetryDB (a bundle of 232 poems is built in for offline use), text you type or paste, and TXT, PDF or DOCX files from your computer. Up to five sources at a time.

    Can I use the lyrics I make here in my own songs?

    The poems in the library are in the public domain. What you make from them is yours. For texts you upload yourself, the usual copyright rules apply to the original: cut up your own notes, not somebody's recent book.

    Does it work on a phone?

    Yes, best in landscape. Swipe a strip sideways to pick it up right away, or hold it for a moment and then drag it in any direction. Swiping up or down over the pile scrolls it. A fullscreen mode hides the browser chrome.

    Why are there no Bowie lyrics in the library?

    They are under copyright. The library holds poems whose authors died long ago. You can always paste your own lines.

    Credits

    Poems from PoetryDB. Phrase detection by compromise (MIT). PDF reading by pdf.js (Apache 2.0), DOCX reading by mammoth.js (BSD). Typefaces Special Elite, Courier Prime, EB Garamond, Libre Baskerville, Old Standard TT and IM Fell English, all under open licences. Built by Lloyd Stellar, electro producer from Hilversum; more free tools and games are on the home page. This tool is not affiliated with or endorsed by the estate of David Bowie; it is a tribute to a way of working.