The new on-demand digital arts channel from the BBC and Arts Council England, The Space, is hosting a 6-month long project that translates Twitter posts into music. Devised by doctoral researcher, Daniel Jones and cellist and composer, Peter Gregson, the Listening Machine is a piece of software that monitors the Twitter activity of 500 undisclosed individuals from the fields of the arts, business, education, politics, science, sports and technology plus a randomly selected group.

It analyses each and every status update in terms of sound, meaning and sentiment based on techniques from natural language processing and machine learning and translates vowel sequences into musical notes. It also employs actual sounds e.g if the word aeroplane is mentioned it generates the sound of an aeroplane. The musical fragments used were painstakingly recorded by the Britten Sinfonia Orchestra.The Listening Machine may well be an intriguing endeavour but is it a timely instance of the tenuous and insecure nature of social media and an infringement - albeit an innocuous one - too far or a next level insight into the way people interact with and use social media?

For a more intricate account of how the Listening Machine works and to tune in live (available 24 hours a day), visit the website.