Half-BIT

Hey, Mr. F here! It took me a BIT more time than expected to get all of this ready but now that is tested, and double tested, I am going to explain. For those who are not familiar with the project’s concept I would strongly recommend reading this.

Half-BIT_EX09_cover_400px Done reading? Let’s go.

Phase II Concept

Grab tweets that are either using #expanding09 and/or Barcelona and feed them into Max/MSP. Inside Max/MSP those tweets are going to be dissected and used to attribute several values to parameters that will generate cross effects that will be then applied to the original tracks. Each keyword uses a stereo channel.

So far so good right? But I was not really happy with this. Twitter is all about constraints (the 140c rule) and I started to think that a tweet that was more characters should have more weight on the whole databending process than a tweet that had less characters.

Development

Setting the two original tracks as targets I started to feed tweets (the infamous #soundgeek #flirtlines) into Max/MSP. The first objective was to get it to respond to those keywords and generate parameters (by associating to each keyword a random value that would be fed to the effects pool).

When this was working to my satisfaction I then gave the next step which is the way that the whole patch is going to work:

Each tweet that includes one or both of the selected keywords will not only trigger the effect pool. The amount of characters that each tweet has will be taken into account by attributing random values to each character on that tweet.

(On a offline test I fed a PDF file into Max/MSP: The original files were destroyed, literally. I knew I was on the rigth path).

Now you are asking: “Random? We all know random real random doesn’t exist! Or do you have a lava lamp?” Nope, no lava lamp here.

To generate those random values I will be using dynamic data as well: in this case the number of followers that the user, sending the tweet, has.

What you can listen to below, are the 2 original tracks and what was produced by setting the patch to grab tonight’s trending topics #oldnames and Glee.

Next saturday the more you tweet #expanding09 or Barcelona the more effective this demonstration of using Social Media to create new media art will be.