Twitter tool turns your tweets into an ever-evolving playlist: What’s your Twitter soundtrack?

Victoria Woollaston February 15, 2018

Donald Trump’s Twitter soundtrack, like some sort of entrance music, is foreboding and loud, while Barack Obama’s is mellow and upbeat. That’s according to a new tool which uses a person’s sentiments on Twitter to create a unique musical track.

Twitter tool turns your tweets into an ever-evolving playlist: What's your Twitter soundtrack?

Called Social Song, the tool lets you type any Twitter username into it before analysing tweets based on the use of emoji, use of words that convey a certain sentiment (such as happiness or anger), and images that contain certain facial expressions.

The music the tool generates was written and produced by Daniel Lazenby at the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology using various instruments to create unique sounds.

Each piano note or cello string has been allocated to represent emotions on a spectrum of happy to sad, joyous to angry and those in-between.

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In particular, the software scans through a user’s Twitter feed detecting facial expressions (in images) and written emotion in posts to grade the sentimental tone of each post on a scale from one to 100. The number for each post is assigned a bar of music, resulting in a “soundtrack” when each Twitter post is looped together.

To use, simply type your (or someone else’s Twitter handle including @) into the search box and press the play button.

As you’d expect, you need to give the tool access to your tweet archive but it won’t post tweets on your behalf, and only analyses the past year’s worth of tweets. Plus, the more you post, the more the soundtrack changes and develops.

Mastercard developed the Twitter tool with British firm StyleTech to mark 20 years as sponsor of The BRIT Awards, meaning it’s a full publicity stunt but one that’s pretty fun nonetheless. The awards take place in London next week (Wednesday 21 February).