Marvim Gainsbug: the Twitter based Song Composer from jeraman on Vimeo.

It should come as no surprise, but Twitter can compose existential nihilistic poetry.

Just ask the creepy, detached voice of Marvim Gainsbug. The robotic, generative songwriter will produce a “song” from Tweet keywords of your choice. And be prepared for some finger snaps at the end of his beat-poetic recitation.

The evil genius of this work is the product of a duo from Recife, Brazil. Details:

Marvim Gainsbug is a musician, singer and composer, created in 2009.

His main influences are Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Dylan, the Brazilian Northeastern Musician, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Alan Turing, Deep Blue, HAL, Wintermute and Marvin, the paranoid android.

Marvim Gainsbug is a software that acts based on Twitter, implemented to compose and to play songs, with music and lyrics, in real time.

The tweets are transformed in verses which are interpreted by Marvim with his singular voice. The melody, the harmony and the rhythm are directly linked with the words of the verses.

Developed in Processing, using Sphinx4, FreeTTS and Twitter4j libraries, by Jeraman and Filipe Calegario. For further informations, visit myspace.com/marvimgainsbug

Even the harmonies, melody, and rhythm are generated algorithmically from the tweets themselves.

Thanks to co-creator Jerman for sending this our way; see:
http://jeraman.info

More photos:
Marvim Gainsbug @ Flickr

Free and open source software is nothing on its own. Like any technology, it’s the users and the community around it that make it meaningful. Musical practice grows out of culture and community; so does music technology.

I’ve heard lots of people buzzing about Expo74, the Max/MSP/Jitter conference in April, and rightfully so – it’s the first major Max event of this kind, and the format looks very cool. But free and open source lovers also have upcoming events in both North and South America.

Pdcon is the third international convention of Pd users, following Austria 2004 and Montreal 2007. It’s like the Olympics of Pd, in other words. (Insert Michael Phelps joke of your choice here.) Brazil has already staged a national event on Pd, and have generally demonstrated themselves as being ridiculously cool and tech-and-art-savvy. They’re looking for more support for international travel, so anyone who can help with that, it’d help make this truly international and democratic.

The event is July 19-26 in Sao Paolo. There’s also still time to submit works; the deadline in March 15.

Pdcon09

For SuperCollider fans, there’s a combination of a workshop series in New York at Harvestworks and a big symposium at Wesleyan. Unlike Pd, SuperCollider began as commercial software. In my view, it’s the most modern and complete code-based language for sound.