Say hello to the Indaba console’s long-lost cousin. Or, well, pet hamster, at least.

Tweet A Sound is a standalone desktop program for Mac OS X built in Max/MSP which uses Twitter to send synthesized audio. Best I can tell, it’s a collection of states for each of the controls in the simple integrated sound design environment, which, when captured as discrete numbers, fall below Twitter’s 140 character limit and can thus be broadcast just like any other message. The app includes a login panel, so thanks to Twitter’s extensive API, you don’t even need to alt-tab your way into Firefox.

These tweets, collected under the #tas hash tag (which, sadly, is quite contaminated because of its application to other topics — there aren’t as many sound designers in the world as there are, say, teaching assistants) can then be fed back into the program to set the controller states at the other end, effectively reproducing a sound in Austin moments after it was programmed in Osaka.

A little nutty, sure, but in a way this makes perfect sense — “Tweet” is onomatopoeia, I think, right?

While Tweet A Sound creator Andrew Spitz doesn’t seem to use the phrase “proof of concept” himself, I’ll go ahead and apply it here simply because this points vaguely toward internet music sharing in a way that’s quite different from what we’ve seen so far. Specifically, it’s capturing sound in an extremely raw state — synth settings, even before they’re rendered to audio at all — and then disseminating it using a platform predicated on immediacy. There’s podcasting, yes, but here we’re transmitting sound that isn’t in a sound file yet. That’s a quantum leap.

Now consider that the app is written in Max/MSP, which has pretty badass integration with Ableton Live on the horizon. Imagine running this as a plugin in a DAW; another quantum leap there, possibly.

Regular RSS can hold more content than tweets and there’s no inherent delay any more than there is with a Twitter post (every account renders to RSS, in fact), which means that the leap after that would take us into plugins with RSS I/O functionality, which wouldn’t be limited by Twitter’s character limit and could be used to transmit things like MIDI in much larger chunks. (Note that we’re not yet talking sample-accurate audio, though I’ve heard of academics with access to the Internet2 network getting usable latency for remote audio — ie, black box with 1/4" audio input, CAT5 ethernet output, and then the same in reverse on the other end.) Server configuration to allow them to publish outgoing feeds probably won’t be trivial for right-brained musicians, at least at first, but a fair number of the kids who are going to spend their graduation money on microphones this coming May won’t be intimidated at all, and if the plugin makers host the feeds the way Ableton recently started hosting collaborative session repositories, configuration can pretty much be automated.

Once we’re there, Osaka programs the sounds, Austin arranges them into chords, and the world gets a little bit smaller once again. Better get started on that staff paper notation wiki.

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Via Twitter:
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Via RSS:
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Yours below, we hope.