Gustavo Luz is a Brazilian painter and the award-winning creative director and founder of 1 3 2 Studio.

KM Why Twitter?

GL I was thinking more about the word “tweet”. What if you could actually hear them as tweets?
I don’t really use Twitter. So for me, this is more how I would want it to be.

KM If you don’t use it, does it have a presence in your life?

GL Oh yeah. I have a feeling that the media uses Twitter like a stand-in for reality, but it’s like the sound of your parents arguing. Because you have a limited amount of characters, everything sounds like shouting. But if you move back, maybe that’s a natural way of people disagreeing with each other to find a solution.

KM Only there’s no end point to it. And having that end point is also very natural. Normally, people go back and forth, and even if it sounds harsh, they would have to resolve it. What makes Twitter weird as a conversation is it can go on forever.

GL And more people can join in. You know what’s funny…. It more like nature.

KM ‘Here I am in nature, getting shouted at by birds.’ Also, people on Twitter can get very addicted to the response. What’s cool about removing the words is that’s also why birds chirp: to get another bird to chirp back.

GL And listening to it this way, you hear [chirps] and then [a flock of birds chirping]. That is exactly how nature works. It has a melody, almost by accident. Sometimes it’s chaotic, more like wind chimes. And it’s not scary anymore. Actually, it’s even soothing. I like how it sounds. The beauty of the thing is that there is a template, because of the character limit. Let’s say you see a score for an orchestra: it’s lots of lines running at the same time and everybody’s following the same bar. Everybody is in the same row. In a way, you can do that with this, because they’re all in the same tempo. They’re not all the same length, but they have have the same limit. Maybe if someone has more followers, they have more volume. And there are the bots, which are making all these fake noises. So if you’re two birds chirping, and suddenly it sounds like there’s 30, that’s going to cause a reaction. The two birds will fly away or maybe they’ll join what they think is a bigger flock.

KM Also, you’re socializing… but you’re not. Everyone is obsessed with how AI is going to take over, but nobody talks about the fact that we’re becoming AI. We have purely digital interactions all the time. Which means you’re manufacturing a digital self, which is a new entity. So speaking of nature, we’re watching everyone learn to interact in a way that’s not actually very natural for us. We’re still animals that are used to seeing visual cues and face-to-face stuff that, suddenly, we’ve taken out of our interactions. How would you like to see this project evolve?

GL My goal was to make something very quickly. To start something that other people can take over and improve if they want. My friend Andy Cavatorta did this beta in 24 hours. That ‘code’ - the way of turning 280 Twitter characters into a music score by converting all the ABCDEFGs into full notes and all the remaining characters into semibreve rests - is stupidly simple, but it works. A lot of the stuff that I make, it doesn’t start out with a goal. Some people need an endpoint or purpose to start. I think it’s okay to make an idea to learn what it means by making it. And I don’t need to control what it means. It’s totally fine if different people see different things. In terms of the effect, I hear this and it makes me feel like things will be fine. If it’s noise, it’s fine. I’m not religious at all, but I almost think about it as being the way god would listen to us. There’s too much happening to spend too much time listening to any one thing. And if you listen to just one of these - one account - over and over, it gets really boring. But when you listen to all of them, that’s when you get something.

Ken Miller is a writer, editor and curator and is a founding partner at There.