Firehose (Electric Guitar and Desktop Computer)  – Tim Kreger

Disembodied voices scream babble into the well from solitude. The mass network experience provides non-consensual participants in a localised peformance for real people in a physical space. Their chatter goes unanswered while we reflect on the sonic consequence of their inane quips, declarations and sandwich narratives.  The twitter firehose projects humanity onto it most banal and addictive screen.

Firehose is a real-time improvisation using the Twitter live stream api.  Twitter provides access to the live stream head which is known as the firehose.  This work uses a filtered form of the firehose to generate a musical stream for the guitar to react to. ASCII characters are mapped to pitch sets and presented in three forms:

1/ In parallel, the mapped pitches control sine tone generators playing simultaneously. Each tweet generates a new sonority and are played as they come off the head of the stream.

2/ Sequentially, each tweet encodes a melodic sequence played by three different waveform generators played in alternation.

3/ Temporally, each tweet triggers an event. This timing of the tweets provides the rhythmic impetus.

The filters used are simple one word filters such as love, happy, lonely, sad etc.  Each filter possesses its own rhythm pace and harmonic patterning as much of traffic can quite often be the same message permeating(ie retweets replies etc).

Spatial location is informed by the geolocation of the tweet if available.

The live guitar is analysed and returns tweets based on dictionaries built up from the incoming tweet stream, mostly babble in response to the text filter.

The tweets used are projected so the audiences can make their own connections between the sonic events and the content matter of the tweets.

Tim Kreger

Tim Kreger was born in Sydney, Australia in 1967. He studied composition with Larry Sitsky and David Worrall at the Canberra School of Music, Australian National University and received a Bachelor of Music (composition) degree in 1990. In 1997 he received a Masters of Music degree from the same institution. From 1991-2001 he was Lecturer in Computer Music at The Australian Centre for the Arts & Technology. He has been involved in numerous collaborations, most recently with Simulus (with Steve Adam & Ross Bencina) and Metraform. Tim currently develops interactive applications for Museums, Galleries and Research Institutions (www.audioreactive.com) and has worked with Jeffrey Shaw, Dennis del Favero, Gina Czarnecki, Forma Arts, Melbourne Museum and the University of New South Wales.