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Tech

The Music Box That Sonifies Tweets

What comes out is something from a dollhouse nightmare. Innocent at first, but creepy in the end.

It looks like a cross between those old logic-testing machines used by the US Army in WWII, and every last unseen robo-grader force fed Scantrons (remember those?) back in high school. Only it sounds like something out of a dollhouse nightmare—innocent at first, but ultimately creepy.

Christina Dellemeschnig built T-TWEE, as a "kinetic sonification" contraption, to contrast the relationship between the microblogging company, its users, and their personal data. T-TWEE translates random tweets into music through a punch card-fed algorithm, creating a dawdling musical meditation on the blurred grounds between sets of personal data and streams of financial data. At least that's the idea.

"The digital finance data stream twitters the personal data of its users out," Dellemesching writes. "Only through the participation of the financial traffic of the digital company the sonification of the individual user is possible."

The DC motor is started by real-time Twitter Inc. stock value prices, that flash on an LCD screen. As the stock price rises, so does the music's tempo.

Of course, this isn't the first time someone has thought about what tweets sound likemusicians have been sonifying tweets for a while now. In that way, T-TWEE is a lot like the Hatnote real-time Wikipedia sonifier. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it would be a fitting companion for that lonely megaphone dictating bummer tweets to a forest in Washington.