day 2 - the droning crowd

today i messed around with writing a program in Processing that reads all the new tweets that people are saying out loud.

I was initially trying to get it so that tweets would just read over each-other in different voices to sound like a droning crowd, but on one computer it was just too complicated to understand anything. Maybe with a lot of computers in one space it would work.

I ended up finding a voice synthesizer that I liked that sounded really somber. I guess I was thinking about this initially as a way to feel like you're not alone when you are alone, but the somber voice makes me feel like maybe it should be coming out of a megaphone. It has a tone more like someone droning orders in a sterile environment, turning the listeners into zombies. I think that getting zombified by these web2.0 services is something that actually happens, so I feel like this fits. By zombified I mean getting so involved that you start living an extra life on the web 2.0, and that life is totally separate from your real life, but it sucks you in. I don't really know where this piece is going, but I feel like it does a good job representing the pull and danger of these networks, at first it just is weird and annoying, but then you can end up getting really into it and leaving it on while you do other work.

That was pretty rambling, heres an audio file of the sound

(download)

-zach