The Listening Machine

The Listening Machine was a sonification that used tweets from a group of 500 participants in the UK. The creators wanted to highlight the interesting dynamics that arise from social interactions and translate those dynamics into music, so to create “a soundtrack of our everyday social lives”. It was also inspired by the Mass Observation Movement (1937), an early British experiment in social research in which 500 volunteers were asked to keep diaries of their everyday lives.

Listen to Wikipedia

Listen to Wikipedia sonifies and visualises activity on Wikipedia, offering limited interactivity. I have asked the authors, Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi, a few questions to explain the sonification process, which they were happy to answer.

The Rhythm of City. Sonifying social media activity in cities around the world

Rhythms of the City by the artists duo Mar Canet Sola and Varvara Guljajeva sonifies online activity in specific cities. The overall activity on Youtube, Twitter and Flickr are measured and compared to historical activity. The resulting value is mapped to a tempo value on a metronome. The more activity there is in a city, the higher the tempo of the corresponding metronome.

Tweetscapes: sonifying Germany’s twitterscape

Continuing on the previous post, Tweetscapes takes on Twitter as well. However, there are notable differences. While Twinthesis can be used as an instrument and offers a few interaction possibilities, Tweetscapes is meant to be listened to, experienced without any direct possible interaction. However, the tweetscapes soundscape has been used as a base for improvisation in live music.

Twittersynth: sonifying public tweets

In this post, I discuss Twinthesis, a sonification of public Tweets.

Twinthesis (also called Twittersynth), is a Twitter sonification application, written in MaxMSP, that uses public tweets as its data source. Every 30 seconds the software pulls out the latest public tweet and converts the characters into ASCII-values.