And NewsFeed had thought all along that Twitter simply sounded like a recipe for success.
Rejoice! The world’s first piece of music composed using Tweets has taken place. The Twinthesis project uses a computer program to extract sounds from those magical messages of 140 characters or less. The resulting “symphony” consisted of high pitched bleeps and deep humming, which, if we’re not mistaken, is exactly how dolphins communicate with each other (well, something like that.)
(LIST: The 140 Best Twitter Feeds)
The man we all have to thank is music technology student Sam Harman, who attends Bournemouth University in the U.K. He came up with it as part of his course, and it works by a program accessing the Twitter feed every 30 seconds, and duly selecting the top 20 tweets. “The system selects one of the characters from the first 20 tweets at random and repeats it to produce a kind of rhythm,” he said. “It can then go through the tweets a character at a time to produce a sort of melody.
Clearly after some sort of Twinthesis world domination, Harman hopes “we could get to the stage where it could pull data off Twitter at more than 100 times every second and this would produce a sort of global symphony.”
(PHOTOS: Behind the scenes with one of Twitter’s most famous users, Ashton Kutcher)
If you’re interested in hearing what this sounds like in person, Harman is planning to “perform” this Saturday night at his university in a showcase of experimental music utilizing online networks. If it gains traction, fully expect the Rolling Stones World Tour of 2020 (provisional tagline: RS 2020! Hindsight Is A Wonderful Thing!) to incorporate it into their set. (via The Daily Telegraph)