Sonifying Twitter’s Emotions Through Music

Abstract

Sonification is a scientific field that seeks to explore the potential of sound as an instrument to convey and interpret data. Its techniques have been developing significantly with the growth of technology and supporting hardware and software, which have spread in our daily environment. This allowed the establishment of new communication tools to share information, opinion and feelings as part of our daily routine. The aim of this project was to unite the social media phenomena with sonification, using Twitter data to extract user’s emotions and translate them into musical compositions. The focus was to explore the potential of music in translating data as personal and subjective as human emotions, developing a musically complex and captivating mapping based on the rules of Western Music. The music is accompanied by a simple visualization, which results in emotions being heard and seen with the corresponding tweets, in a multimodal experience that represents Twitter’s emotional reality. The mapping was tested through an online survey, and despite a few misunderstandings, the results were generally positive, expressing the efficiency and impact of the developed system.