Socioacoustic

Socioacoustic is a project of sonifying social media events. In particular, I used Twitter’s streaming API to track specific hashtags which I then mapped to musical parameters. For this project, I mostly played the role of programmer and sound designer where I had to learn how to use Twitter’s API and then design the soundscape that the tweets will actively “play” in real-time.

The track below was one I created by tracking tweets about the Pluto flyby. It was added to a compilation album entitled, “New Horizons: Pluto Flyby Soundtracks.”

I used nodejs to stream the tweets from Twitter’s API. Nodejs is really nice for using javascript outside of a browser. To sonify the tweets, I used Pd as the audio engine that received the data with open sound control. The next step will be to develop a visual element to the project that changes based on the text content (similar to the audio).

This idea was inspired by Jon Bellona’s #Carbonfeed, which is a beautifully fascinating work bringing awareness to the “environmental cost of online behavior.”