Move over Taylor Swift: Here comes the first Twitter music album

UK researcher squeezes music into 140-character soundbites

A UK researcher has compiled what he is calling the first album of Twitter music, that is, music squeezed into Twitter's signature 140-character messages.

Dan Stowell, a composer and computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London, compiled the album – called sc140 – from Tweets sent from around the world. As much as five minutes of music can be jammed into a Tweet using programming tricks.

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"It all started a few months ago," said Stowell, who is studying for his PhD in Queen Mary's Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), in a statement. "I was writing in a programming language - called SuperCollider - that tells a computer what sounds to make and posted a tweet containing the instructions to create a sound like waves crashing on the shore. The next thing I knew people were tweeting back with sounds and music of their own. Some of the tweets made such great music that I couldn't just let them vanish into the ether. So I brought all the best ones together in an online album."

Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" would looks like this in a Tweet:

{b="GGHJJHGECCEG".ascii.stutter;f=Duty.kr(0.15,0,Dseq([b,71!3,69!5,b,69!3,67!5,0].flat.midicps))*[1,2];LFCub.ar(f)/9}.play

Stowell said microblogging makes for a promising collaborative environment for musicians.

The album is downloadable here. 

Of course, the ultimate Twitter album might actually contain songs about Twitter, such as Dan Walker's "Twitter Song." 

• music
• Twitter