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Scientific American

May 21, 2012

Musical tweets for a listening machine

I’ve been swamped lately with finishing up my master’s thesis and have been tweeting occasional gripes and self-created hashtags about the process.

By Princess Ojiaku

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

I've been swamped lately with finishing up my master's thesis and have been tweeting occasional gripes and self-created hashtags about the process.

#thesisjams might not be inspiring to anyone besides me, but what if all my tweets about the process were unwittingly being turned into public music?

The Listening Machine is a project by composer and cellist Peter Gregson and doctoral researcher and artistic programmer Daniel Jones. They've taken the twitter feeds of 500 unidentified people and turned them into a constant stream of music.

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From the website's FAQ:

What exactly is being translated into sound?

Music and human language have very different properties, so it's impossible to directly translate one into the other. Instead, The Listening Machine extract various pieces of information and uses them to control different parameters of the piece.

  • The overall rate of tweeting is linked to the rate and speed of music triggered
  • Emotional trends govern the piece's musical mode: positive, negative or neutral
  • Phrases and sentences that make up tweets are used to generate sequences of musical notes
  • Other keywords and topics are used to trigger larger movements within the piece

To find out more about how the Listening Machine works, check out their in-depth explanation here.

I'm probably not one of the 500 twitter users fueling the machine, but it definitely qualifies as one of my #thesisjams.

About Princess Ojiaku

Hey there! I'm a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the Neuroscience and Public Policy program. I'm also a musician who played in two bands in North Carolina, one called Pink Flag and another called Deals. My personal passions are science, music, and cycling as transportation.

I got into science as a kid while tagging along and watching my mom do experiments in her lab. I found that while I loved science, I didn't want to be alone in an ivory tower, crunching data that few others would understand. I also noticed that many other people thought science was this scary and incomprehensible entity of obscurity. When I realized that there were people working to make science fun and accessible to everyone, I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do. The two things I find the most immensely interesting and continually impressing are music and neuroscience, so these are the topics that I'll focus on in my blog. Philosophy and politics are my second loves, so I might pop in an occasional post on these topics as well. Ultimately I am here to share things that give me wonder. I hope that reading Science with Moxie gives you a bit of that wonder too.

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