Anyone with half a brain can put a song onto Twitter by pasting in the URL for a song. For some, that isn’t enough — they figured out how to paste entire songs into the 140-character Twitter window. A free, open source program called SuperCollider (simplified instructions below) turns the short strings of code into music.
It all started when Dan Stowell, a Ph.D. candidate at London’s Queen Mary’s Centre for Digital Music, tweeted “instructions on how to make a sound like waves crashing on the shore” according to a statement. Other students responded in kind, ultimately contributing 22 tweetable songs for a crowdsourced album called sc140, released in conjunction with The Wire magazine.
Plenty of other software exists that can turn code into sounds, but Music Ally newsletter (subscription required) calls this the “first ever Twitter album” and it’s right about that so far as we can tell. Here’s what the 11th song on the album, “MicroMoog,” looks like in my Twitter feed:
We’ve simplified the legwork required to play these as they are meant to be heard — as code — in the following beginner’s guide to the sc140 album. If you’d rather hear it quickly, stream the songs in your web browser instead. We found listening to the code more interesting because many of the songs include generative code and sound different every time.
Here’s how you can to start listening to Thor Magnusson’s “07” (or any other song on the sc140 album) in under five minutes:
Install the recommended version of the open source SuperCollider 3 software.
Run SuperCollider 3 and click the Boot button in the “localhost” window.
- In the “SuperCollider (Post Window)” window, choose File > Open a new Code Window.
- Paste Magnusson’s coded song into the new Code Window. Here’s the code:
play{x=SinOsc;y=LFNoise0;a=y.ar(8);(x.ar(Pulse.ar(1)24)+x.ar(90+(a90))+MoogFF.ar(Saw.ar(y.ar(4,333,666)),a*XLine.ar(1,39,99,99,0,2)))!2/3}
- Execute the code for Magnusson’s “07” by pressing Enter (on a Mac) or CTRL+Enter (on Windows) with the cursor at the end of code in the Code Window. You should hear something like this excerpt from “07”:
We ran into one issue — Thor Magnusson’s 140-character song dropped a few characters from the end when we tweeted it, although other songs didn’t have that problem. And clearly, this 140-character music format has its limitations in terms of expression and nuance. For instance, you couldn’t encode a normal song with vocals and so on into SuperCollider 3 language and have it sound just like a CD.
That doesn’t stop it from being really neat.
