Melodal

Melodal is a research project built within my final project whilst studying Digital Art and Technology at Plymouth University. It explores the potential uses of online message data, in particular the message data of those we have lost.

The themes of which Melodal were built upon include my own interest in music, digital art, data after death and the ideas of projects such as AUTOICON, the last work by artist Donald Rodney, and Double Think, the research project by Ian Sergent.

Melodal adds a unique dimension to remembering conversations. It can detect joy, anger, disgust, sadness and fear adjusting the music generated accordingly per message.

Emotional tone is detected by using IBM’s “Tone Analyser Service” and the music is constructed from predefined loops, created by myself. The loops are changed in key, scale and length to suit the analysis returned by IBM.

Melodal can add new and expanded meaning to the billions of messages we send each other every day, by tapping into the roots of conversational texts.