This is a demo of Twinthesis –  a Mac software synthesizer, designed to explore the ‘sound’ of Twitter.

Developer Sam Harman describes Twinthesis as “an attempt to sonify the human randomness being generated on the service”:

The aims of this project, are to create a synthesiser capable of both additive and granular synthesis using live tweets to generate and manipulate the sound. The synthesiser currently calls twitter once every 30 seconds, so a new tweet is used to generate the sound every 30 seconds. The synthesis engine, has an element of performance to it, and can be used to create experimental music.

A full scientific paper and report can be downloaded about twinthesis, detailing aspects of how the patch works, and certain constraints of the project in it’s current state. Twinthesis is a free app for Macs.

Note: This synthesiser is still in development and can be considered an experimental beta version.