Vintage radio tweets in real time

What do you get when you cross a 1930s vintage radio with a Twitter account? A device that speaks out your tweets with vintage static hiss, that's what.

 

An article on Makezine.com said the Tweet-speaking radio is a project of Sean Hathaway, which is built into a modified 1930s Philco radio.

 

Dubbed "Volume And Noise," the device is the latest in Hathaway's series of "interactive social media scraping art pieces." "It is a contraption that reads tweets based on a set of user-defined search terms in real time," he said.  

 

Hathaway said that for a show at the AFRU Gallery in Portland where the device was displayed for the month of November, all of the search terms are political in nature for an election-timed political art show.

 

But he said the search terms could be any combination of ideas desired and easily changed by the user.

 

While the device uses the chassis of an antique 1930s radio, it has a modern amplifier, an Arduino microcontroller and a modified antique meter that counts Tweets per Minute (TPM).

 

"All of the audio including the radio static, tuning sounds and filtering to produce the antique sound of the radio is all happing through digital processing in real time," he said. — TJD, GMA News