TwitterRadio looks for tweets with #twitterradio, analyzes the emotion of the tweet, and plays a song with light to correspond to the returned emotion. My main goal for this project was to visualize data from social media. In the past five years, social media has become a larger and larger part of people’s day to day lives. Today, many people post personal information on the Internet with hopes of receiving feedback like likes or shares. I wanted to create a new way to give real time feedback to social media users.

In particular, I am fascinated by the ways in which we interact with social media affects our emotions. I decided to perform sentiment analysis on Twitter posts. (I used Twitter because it is one of the main social media platforms active users post to regularly.) In return, the output – light and sound – would correspond to the returned emotion. From this, the idea of TwitterRadio came to life.

Because of the name of my project – TwitterRadio – I made the enclosure look like an old-fashioned radio. In order to make the enclosure further appear like a ‘real’ radio to users, I play music from a Bluetooth speaker hidden inside the enclosure. When the radio is not in use, I want the radio to still appear ‘alive.’ While TwitterRadio waits for a tweet, the neopixels light up in an active rainbow pattern. I chose a rainbow pattern because I did not want the waiting state to correlate to one of the returned emotions. Rather, with this visual output, the radio appears as though it is cycling through possible emotions to display.