Textual Noise

October 22, 2009 9:35 PM

Textual Noise
Textual Noise is a sort of Web 2.0 art project, consisting of a Python Twitterbot which tweets a random YouTube comment every hour, on the hour. It is essentially a text white noise generator, hence the name, and is the source of some highly amusing idiocy if nothing else.

I've just gotten this going (I only had the idea earlier tonight), I plan to add many features (apply Burroughs/Gysin cutup technique to a comment/several comments, Markov chains, etc., it's all on the page). There may still be bugs as well, but so far it appears to work fine. It's pretty simple, really. There should hopefully be a text-to-speech PHP thingy that will speak the latest tweet later tonight or tomorrow. The code itself is pretty simple, using BeautifulSoup for the YouTube bits. I'll probably post it later, to give me a chance to discover any hidden bugs.

posted by DecemberBoy (4 comments total)

You really must try the text-to-speech bit (I hadn't finished it when I submitted this): Here. It picks a comment at random, and submits it to the good old Bell Labs speech synthesizer website, picking a random synthesized voice to speak it in. It's the most hilarious part of the whole thing so far. "asian guys r so hott" spoken in the US Indian voice justifies this entire effort, quite frankly.
posted by DecemberBoy at 11:55 PM on October 22, 2009

For me just the tweeting works the best. But I appreciate the expansion into other media.
posted by gomichild at 4:34 AM on October 23, 2009

For anyone who might assume this is another tired Web 2.0 "mashup" thingy - it's really quite the opposite. If anything, it points out the some of the absurdity of the whole Web 2.0/"social network"/whatever you want to call it, and the vast quantities of banality it generates. I mean, we have a technology that enables us to access all of human knowledge on a handheld device, and most of it is made up of... well, textual noise. I've also got some Max/MSP and SuperCollider stuff based on this brewing, which I may post to Music.
posted by DecemberBoy at 6:04 PM on October 23, 2009

Well, for some reason, I moved and the thing hasn't worked since. I have no idea why. I'm considering it dead for the time being.
posted by DecemberBoy at 12:40 PM on December 6, 2009