If you love electronic music, Twitter and OS X, you need to download Tweet-a-Sound immediately. It’s a MAX/MSP-based synthesizer for OS X that’s tricked out to tweet! It’s a not sonic Twitpic, either. Rather than simply turn your creation into an audio file and linking to it, it sends it as text. If someone wants to hear the sound you’ve made, all they have to do is copy it from their web browser or Twitter client and paste it into Tweet-a-Sound. The application uses this long and rather cryptic string of numbers to set the appropriate parameters on the synth and play it.
You can produce sounds that last anywhere from 0.1 seconds all the way to a full minute. When you’re finished fiddling with frequencies and your waveform is ready for transmission, you can either send the tweet straight from Tweet-a-Sound or copy it and paste it into the Twitter client of your choice. Messages are prepended with #tas so that other synth geeks can find your work easily with a simple search.
I made a few sounds with it, the source of which you can also find with a Twitter search. I’ve also made mp3s of two of them if you’d just rather listen here.
The first sound is exactly how Tweet-a-Sound plays it, I only boosted the volume slightly in post-production.
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For this next one, instead of making the sound and then playing it back once to record the direct output, I used Tweet-a-Sound to restart its playback periodically. I also changed parameters on the synth whilst it was playing. This audio file cannot be expressed in a tweet, of course, as only its initial settings can, but it shows that you can use the application for more than its main intended purpose.
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downloading “the dragon kills st george” so that i can listen on proper headphones and not just my shitty work computer speakers. but on even those speakers it sounds pretty cool.
how do you want to collaborate? i am now totally addicited to this thing!
Cheers, cinchel! I also like it on my laptop’s speakers, but thanks for giving it a go in headphones, too.
I think we should collaborate initially in the spirit of the tool itself by using each other’s tweeted numeric strings and generating those sounds using our own copies of Tweet-a-Sound. We can record those sounds on our own and feed them into the sequencer of our choice, like Ableton Live or Logic, and alter them however we wish. I don’t care how far out we go, really, but if you can think of other restrictions that would help foster creativity, please let me know and we can observe them.
The reason I think we should use our own copies is not only because it keeps with the idea of the tool, but also because I think there’s a bit of a telephone game going on with it. I’ve tried recreating sounds I’ve made by pasting in the numeric string, and while they come back the same most of the time, often they come back a bit wrong, but in an interesting way. I’m not sure if pasting a new string into the application clears all the previous settings of the synth. For example, say Sound 1 uses effects, but Sound 2 doesn’t, I think Sound 2 may play back using the effects of Sound 1 because it fails to clear what it doesn’t use itself. I’m not sure, but if there is any opportunity of introducing unintended mutations, I think we should exploit it.
Once we’ve recorded our own copies of each other’s sounds, we should send each other audio files of how we heard our own sounds originally. The differences will be interesting. Perhaps we should have both copies of each sound in hand before we begin sequencing. I quite like the idea of a piece in which the “original” sound (from the creator, as he intended it) plays off/against an accidental mutant sound.
sounds like a plan..i will start creating more #tas but instead of tweeting them all(the rest of my followers might go crazy) i will post the stings to a cinchel.com/wp post (which i will DM you when i start it)
yeah i already grabbed one of your stings ..i like the surprise of it. kinda like dialing a random phone number (keeping on the phone analogy)
sounds like fun