Just the thought of trying to explain this one to my grandparents is making my head hurt. “OK, let’s start with Twitter. You know what Twitter is, yes? No? Oh.”

Dan has curated an album called sc140. All the tracks are tweets that people have posted on Twitter, using the programming language SuperCollider.

The idea was to see how much music you could fit into 140 characters of code, for example:

{LocalOut.ar(a=DynKlank.ar(`[LocalIn.ar.clip2(LFPulse.kr([1,2,1/8])
.sum/2)**100*100],Impulse.ar(10)));HPF.ar(a).clip2}.play//

…which translates into this:

There are 22 tracks in total from a variety of artists. The album’s doing well – it’s got support from The Wire magazine and now there’s an article about it in New Scientist.

“My granny might raise her eyebrows if I gave her sc140 for Christmas, but if yours is the Aphex Twin type, then she’d definitely love it,” said Stowell, who has recently had media training, and knows a good soundbite when he hears one.

Download the full album for free.