Move over Taylor Swift: Make way for 1st Twitter music album

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.

All-time greatest Google songs 

"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." 

For more on network research, follow our Alpha Doggs blog.