Text to Music

by Andrew Faraday

Overview

A derivation of my very first ruby project, reading a string and converting it to control signals for puredata. The pure data patch recieves these via a TCP port and sends them to some short audio chains and the result is heard in sound. This has also been plugged-in to the twitter streaming API, to sonify tweets as they come in. A sort of literal twitter. Watch out for rhyming and/or recurring words, you can actually hear that 'how now brown cow' rhymes. You can also get some drums sounds out of ascii characters: '_=_=___=_!_=__+='.

Requirements

• git
• ruby
• rubygems
• openssl-lib
• Pure Data Extended (from www.puredata.info/downloads/pd-extended)
• Gems: (bundle install or sudo gem install tweetstream highline twitter_oauth)
  • tweetstream
  • highline
  • twitter_oauth

Installation

• Make sure you have the above programs and gems.
• Clone the git repository. (git clone https://github.com/AJFaraday/Text-to-music.git)
• Make a copy of the file config.yml.template called config.yml (cp config.yml.template config.yml)
• (Optional) Modify config.yml as required

Manual Mode

• Open ruby_interact.pd in puredata (make sure 'compute audio' is checked)
• Open manual_input.rb in ruby (ruby scripts/manual-input.rb)
• Input a speed from 1 to 10
• Type some text and listen to the result.
• Repeat as required
• press ctrl+c to end the script

Twitter stream sonification

• Open ruby_interact.pd in puredata (make sure 'compute audio' is checked)
• ruby scripts/twitter.rb
• You will be prompted to authorise text-to-music to know who is following you.
• (After authorising text-to-music, you will be given two lines to add to config.yml, if you do this you will not need to authorise it again.)
• Watch the tweets contining 'fail' rolling in and being sonified
• To stop script press ctrl+c (you may have to hold it from there)
• Optionally:
  • Change the default search term in config.yml
  • use arguments to change the searched for terms (e.g. ruby scripts/twitter-stream.rb win or ruby scripts/twitter-stream.rb right wrong)

RSS feed sonification

By default, the rss feed will sonify the first 5 items of a feed, then begin again when an item is added. Initially developed and tested with the bbc news headlines feed, other rss feeds may be structured differently

• Open ruby_interact.rb in puredata (make sure 'compute audio' is checked)
• ruby scripts/rss-feed.rb
• Optionally:
  • Set a different rss feed by changing the default feed in config.yml
  • Set a different feed as an argument (e.g. ruby scripts/rss-feed.rb http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml)

Reading a file

• Open ruby_interact.rb in pure data (make sure 'compute audio' is checked)
• ruby scripts/manual-input.rb followed by a file name (e.g. ruby scripts/manual-input.rb README.md will read this file)

Future intentions

• Connect to Pidgin or IRC, musical chat client.
• Find a library for midi output, to feed a hardware synthesizer.
• Use location information from tweets (longitude and latitude) to make repeatable timbral changes to tweets.
• Alternative pure data patches, providing a kind of 'audio skinning' (this will require a restructure of the pure data patch to put the TCP recieve part in an abstraction).
• find a way to automatically add oath credentials to config.yml
• Use other live-streaming text APIs to feed the algorithm:
  • National Rail real-time api ('https://datafeeds.networkrail.co.uk/ntrod/')

Contributors

• Andrew Faraday
• Robin Gower

Testers

• Richard Knight
• Peter Shillito

Notes

• The word 'potato' sounds surprisingly pleasant due to the reversed patter, 'ot' and 'to'
• I have added a vanilla mod to the pure data patch, requiring no pd-extended libraries. This can be run entirely in the commandline with puredata -nogui ruby_interact_vanilla.pd