Music That You Can Tweet About (140-Character Twitter Music Challenge)

Jacob Joaquin is exploring the idea of composing for Twitter.

Can you make music within the constraints of 140 characters?

Here’s Joaquin’s SuperCollider Bohlen-Pierce Tweet – above as audio, and below as text:

fork{loop{play{f=_*3.pow(17.rand/13);e=EnvGen.ar(Env.perc,1,0.3,0,1,2);
PMOsc.ar(f.([438,442]),f.(880),f.(e))*e};[1/6,1/3].choose.wait}}

That only weighs in at 135 characters – imagine what you could do with another 5 characters!

Microtonal tuning courtesy of the Bohlen–Pierce scale.

You can download a compilation album that features 22 tracks, all composed with 140 characters or less of code.

If anybody else is up for the 140-Character Twitter Music Challenge, let us know in the comments!

21 thoughts on “Music That You Can Tweet About (140-Character Twitter Music Challenge)”

  14. We've reported on Mixtikl's tweetability – but it's something fundamentally different – just posting a URL to Twitter, vs expressing a composition succinctly in 140 characters.

  15. I had a feature that was sort of halfway between that SuperCollider tweet and the Mixtikl ones in an earlier beta version of FunkBox. It translated an individual beat pattern into alphanumeric text (like how the MixTikl URL looks once you go through the shortener) but it was all contained in 140 chars (like that SC one).

    It included a #FunkBox hashtag, and then within the app it would search and pull up any tweets with that hashtag and you could preview and import the beats. It was pretty cool, really the same thing as a normal file-share type server, but it helps to tie it in with an existing social network so people don't need a new login, and people not currently using the app can see new beats pop up in their existing twitter feed.

    The problem was that after you posted several of these gibberish looking tweets, Twitter flagged you as a spammer and removed your account from being able to be searched. I decided it wasn't cool to have that happen to people using my app and just dropped the feature.

    Love the concept though! There's the theory of being able to share stuff, and the reality of how often you actually get around to it. I've found the reality usually ends up being only the occasional sequence shared with a friend. Automating as much of the sharing as possible and hooking it into something popular and social like twitter has the potential to make the sharing happen much easier and often with a lot more people. Especially if it all happens within the music app itself.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *