Category: Uncategorised

Learning while making

I’ve just shipped off the first commission! I can’t say much about it yet, as it’s surprise birthday present for someone, but I’ll post a copy to my podcast shortly after their birthday arrives.

The patch for the piece I am sending off today

I learned a bit while making it, about how to better use a module I’ve had for a long time. Also, I think I set a personal record for most cables used in a single patch! It doesn’t look like much in the picture, but only because the black cables, are hard to see against the black synth and they outnumber the other colours. Details of what I learned and what all those cables were doing will go into the programme notes when I post the audio later.
I’m already hard at work on the next one, which I was making while updating on comet news. Probably all the sounds are recorded, so I’m just mixing it now. I thought it would be a good idea to do some more manual-sounding fades and pans, so I’m using some physical faders. The online documentation was a little bit spotty on how to get this work, so I’ll put some instructions at the bottom of this post.
Noise music commissions make great gifts, for birthdays, the holidays or just as a surprise! They are delivered not only as audio, but with a story of how it was made – including influences and even some instructions on how to recreate the sounds! This especially fun for people interested in music or sound design! If you order in November, delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas!

Using midifaders with Ardour on Linux

These instructions are for a NanoKontrol2, but will work for many other popular faders.

  1. The Ardour manual starts out very well, so follow it’s instructions to get going.
  2. Start Ardour.
  3. Go to qjackctl and click the connect button.
  4. Expand all to find the NanoKontrol2 in the list on the left.
  5. Draw a connection between the NanoKontrol2 on the left and Ardour on the right. (You will need to make this connection every time you start Jack and Ardour.)
  6. Go to Ardour and open preferences.
  7. Go to the Control Surfaces tab.
  8. Enable ‘Generic MIDI’.
  9. Then double click generic MIDI.
  10. A window will open listing a bunch of control surfaces.
  11. NanoKontrol2 is in the list twice. The one that mentions ‘Master’ maps the 8th fader to the master faders and has seven channels for tracks. The other one uses all faders for tracks.
  12. NanoKontrol2 does not support touch, so you will be able to use this on tracks when they are set to ‘Write’ or ‘Manual’, but not when set to ‘Play or ‘Touch’.
  13. Record enable will not behave correctly unless you run the NanoKontrol2 configuration software in WINE

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion

Gluten Free Noise!

All noise music compositions are 100% gluten free and contain no soya based fillers, and are suitable for vegetarians. One listener asks:

My friend is allergic to nuts and to noises made with nuts. For example, he cannot listen to the Nutcracker. Is your music processed in a facility that also processes nuts? Is it possible to commission a noise piece with no trace amounts of nut noises?

Yes, this is possible!
For people with such, ahem, severe nut allergies, any music recorded in or previous to 2006 may contain traces of nut sounds. An audit, undertaken this morning, indicates that all music from 2007 onwards is entirely nut-free. If you have any specific allergies, for example, to nut sounds or equal temperament, please make this clear when placing your order. (Some pieces on my podcast may contain traces of 12 tone equal temperament, but none of the past commissions do.)
Commissioned pieces of music make great gifts for hard-to-shop for people! Delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas. Order now! The introductory price of £5 will only last until Thursday.

Do you have any questions of your own? Let me know and I’ll answer them in a forthcoming post!

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion

Sustainability

Someone on Diaspora asked me: if I only use recorded sounds once, how does this effect sustainability of my music?
This is an interesting question! While the sounds themselves are not recycled, this actually does effect my disk space usage. Once a piece is done, its done and I don’t need the source sounds any more, so I have no need to keep them around. This means that at the end of creating a minute of noise, I have, usually, an uncompressed file and a compressed Mp3 (plus whatever file format the commissioner wants for themselves). A minute of AIFF or WAV runs up to 11 MB and the MP3 is around 1MB, so this really takes up very little hard drive space. (Indeed, the Mp3 could fit on a floppy disk!!)

recycled synthA recycled synth I saw on Sunday.

There are other concerns in sustainability however, one of the most important is e-waste. Every time you get rid of an old computer, it needs to be disposed of without causing pollution. This makes disposal a challenge. Indeed, getting a new laptop involves a fair amount of pollution and may also include conflict minerals. I’d say upgrading hardware is a greater sustainability issue than hard drive space might be. How does this interact with my music?

  • Digital Music – This has the greatest potential for e-waste, however, my laptop is already 4 years old and I have no plans to upgrade it, because it is fast enough to do what I want. I write my own programs in SuperCollider to digital audio. When I started doing this, more than a decade ago, I had to be smart about efficiency, so I could get everything to run in real time without maxing out my processor. I really have never run into this issue at all with my current laptop – I feel like the upgrade cycle is now more driven by graphics. I run Ubuntu Studio, which also specifically supports older laptops. Should this laptop die, I would probably get a used one. Indeed, I’d look for the very same one I have now.
  • Acoustic – I mentioned using sounds from all kinds of various locations as possibilities in acoustic pieces. However, these were gathered while I was already in the area. I try to avoid flying as much as possible. Since I don’t re-use sounds, putting together an acoustic piece frees up space on my hard drive.
  • Analogue – when I bought my synthesiser, 15 years ago, I also bought a computer at the same time. I still use the synthesiser all the time. Analogue hardware doesn’t go obsolete and doesn’t require upgrading. When I get new modules, it’s to add new functionality, not to replace what I’ve already got. For people who want to make electronic music, analogue gear has a higher upfront cost, but outlasts digital. I expect my synth is less than halfway through it’s usable life. Planned obsolescence and the e-waste created by that is just not an issue.

Commissions are ecologically friendly and make great gifts! Digital-download-only commissions are a perfect gift for for Green friends and family who want to avoid clutter. Delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas. Order now! The introductory price of £5 will only last until Thursday.

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion

Glitching sounds

Today, I went to the Loud Tate event. My friend Antonio Roberts was presenting some work. Also, there were workshops on glitch and modular synthesis.
Antonio’s piece was a projection of ever changing glitch, which my mobile phone camera failed to adequately capture. It was being shown on the underside of an arch in a round stairwell. Tate Britain is really full of art, so it must be hard to accomodate one day installations.

The synthesisers were set up in the middle of a gallery. Three guys with cool modular systems were buried in their wires, twisting knobs and making beats. I’m not totally sure how educational it was, but I did get to look over their shoulders. Modules have changed a lot since I got my MOTM system in 1998-2000. There are a lot of cool new ideas and, I suspect, new ways of labelling the old ideas, which make it slightly confusing for a fogey like myself. I commented to somebody that synthesisers had changed a lot in the last 14 years and, anyway, it turns out this event was actually meant for people under 25.
I suspect that at least one of the guys with the synths was playing with the analog modular group that I had tried to take my dad to see, the night that he developed his heart problems. I kind of wanted to ask if they were the same guys, but I thought the conversation might get awkward…
I do have one new module that I’ve yet to fully explore, and I’m pondering adding a few others to get caught up with these modern times. I’m looking forward to using my new module in a commission. It models orbital dynamics of planets in some way. I’m hoping it can be made to undulate, which is a customer request I’ve just gotten.
The visual glitchers were also having a meeting, so I went there to see Antonio. Unfortunately, I missed their presentations, but I did catch Antonio giving a quick tutorial in graphic glitching. He saved an image as a bitmap and then opened it in Audacity as a u-law file. He added some phasing and echo effects and then re-saved it as a bmp. It did interesting things to the image. What I want to experiment with is going the other way. This would likely entail:

  1. Convert an audio file to ulaw format.
  2. Save that file as a .bmp
  3. Open the .bmp in an image editor, such as GIMP
  4. Apply effects to the image, such as reversing it, colour correction, try drawing – I need to play around on this step to see what would happen
  5. Open the bmp in audacity. If it sounds good, convert it back to a WAV or AIFF.

I’m going to try this out when I get a moment. Right now all my commissions are all analogue, so this would be a good experiment for a digital commission, when one of those arrives. I will report back on how it worked in practice.
Tomorrow is an ‘informal meet and greet’ in London for analogue synth users. I’m going to bring my new module – and a screw driver. The mounting rails on it are super fiddly and I cannot get the thing to screw in without cross-threading it. It’s become too frustrating, so I put it aside and hopefully somebody with a steadier hand and more patience can help out.
Your commissions are fun to research and fun to make. They make great gifts. Order now and delivery is guaranteed in time for Christmas or Hanukkah. Act now to get the sale price of just £5 for one piece – there are only two left at that price point!

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion

Making a Connection

And the most difficult of Etsy’s points for marketing my shop:

  • They need a connection. In a screaming sea of marketing messages, they need to see that you’re a kind and interesting human being, and therefore worth listening to.
[Puppy. Click through for album of puppy images]

I’ve just taken a break from playing with my new puppy to try to deal with this stipulation of sincerity-on-demand. Well, half taken a break. My kitchen, bathroom and living room are all being repainted at the moment, so the house is extremely chaotic and there’s stuff everywhere. The 13 week old puppy is very curious about exploring, and very into exploring with his teeth, so I have to see where he’s gotten off to and make sure that the chewing I hear is his rope toy and not a power cable. I did catch him tasting the plug for my synthesiser last night. We have 220 volt power in the UK, so should he actually chew through a cable, that would be very bad news.
Last night he also got himself tangled in my patch cords, which is suboptimal and caused my audio interface to tumble, but fortunately, I caught it before it hit the ground. This is extremely poor timing on the painting, since the puppy’s vaccinations have not yet taken effect. I can’t just go tire him out in the dog park. He can run around the house or the smallish back garden (where he tries desperately to eat every ornamental plant in it). A relatively puppy proof living room with a kong toy is fine, but the bedrooms are less so. He also wants to show off his newly acquired ability to run up and down stairs. Anyway, it’s good I’m only trying to write things a minute long, because sometimes it seems like he’s interrupting me every 30 seconds, by racing past with my housemate’s underwear in his mouth or sneaking down to the rooms that are being painted. (note to self: buy a baby gate). (I could lock him in my room, but then he’d be eating my underwear. And seriously, if this paragraph seems scattered, it’s been interrupted 4 times. I know he needs better boundaries etc, but the painting is making it difficult.)
Anyway, back to the point- I’m not sure I agree with the point, actually. Milton Babbitt was well known both for his amazing compositions and his anti-listener screed, ‘Who Cares if you Listen‘. Even Lou Harrison, a benevolent and Santa Claus like figure who I had the great pleasure of meeting and speaking Esperanto with, could be a wee bit of a jerk sometimes. He only thought music was worth his time if he agreed with the tuning system and was contemptuous of composers who used other systems, telling them that their 5th was two cents out of tune. On a musical level, I don’t think it really matters if composers are kind or are good conversationalists.The interestingness of their music matters a great deal.
I don’t think music is a special case in this. A few Christmases ago, I got my sister in law a very nice mug off of Etsy that has owls on it. I did it because I like getting something handmade, because it seems more special and because she loves owls. I communicated briefly with the artist and he was polite and prompt, but I just don’t know about the rest of this. Maybe other people feel differently? Leave a comment if you have a thought on artist personalities.
Whether or not I’m worth listening to, however, is easy to decide. My past commissions are available for your perusal, so you can make up your own mind on this. I’ve got two more underway at the moment! The music commissions are all handmade, and one of a kind. They make a very special gift. Order now and delivery is guaranteed in time for Christmas or Hanukkah. Act now to get the sale price of just £5 for one piece – there are only two left at that price point!

Noise Music for Busy Professionals

Continuing to work through Etsy’s guide to holiday marketing, let’s look at what else customers (that’s you!) need:

  • They need context. They need to know why, among all those other gift ideas threatening to bury them, your product is a good choice for specific people.

In my previous post, I wrote: ‘This is noise music for busy professionals, for people who are new to noise or for folks who just like miniatures.’
Consider for a moment that every culture of humans on earth makes art and music. No matter how isolated or remote, everyone’s got art and music. Music is a human universal. Indeed, it’s part of what makes us human. We all know we need music – that’s why mp3 players are so popular. But why noise music in particular? And why miniatures?
Well, what is noise? This gets into some deep philosophical issues! There are some great books on this that I can’t hope to summarise here, so let’s just say that noise music is made up of sounds not often currently used in music. Noise has sounds, textures and forms that are currently outside of established boundaries of most music – for now. But music is constantly changing and needs new forms, sounds and textures! Today’s noise sound is tomorrow’s pop sound. Noise music is, in fact, the future of music.
It’s not the immediate future. Indeed, noise music offers potential futures. But by listening to noise music, you hear the cusp of music before others. If you’re a busy professional, you know that those who get ahead are the ones who anticipate trends before they happen. So much capitalist success is realising what’s going to be in demand in advance, so you’re able to come up with the supply.
Obviously, for capitalists, there’s more to life for work – there’s also conspicuous consumption. But it’s good to be in practice on keeping ahead of things, inside and outside your fields. Your friends and colleagues will recognise your far-sighted views, when you share a commissioned noise music piece on your social media account – whether on the tried and true CIA-data-gathering of facebook or the trendy and exciting ello, your contacts will know that you’ve got your eye on the horizon!
Because the piece is short, it gives you a bite-sized glimpse into the future, without unmooring you from the demands of daily life. Yes, you’ll be transported, but still have plenty of time to make your train! And, indeed, your associates who are curious about your new work of art, will be willing to give the whole thing a go. Your cultural capital will increase as a result of your far-sightedness and the easily digestible length. What could be conspicuously consumed than a short musical commission!
Is someone in your life is a rampant capitalist, super busy or would just appreciate and extra bit of cultural capital? Short noise pieces make great gifts. Order now and delivery is guaranteed in time for Christmas or Hanukkah. Act now to get the sale price of just £5 for one piece!

How Noise Commissions are Made

I’ve just read the Etsy Guide for building one’s shop, including a section on what customers (that’s you!) need:

  • They need a story. They need to hear how your product is made, and what brought you to create it. They need a reason to become attached to you and what you make.

The making of a minute of noise starts with material gathering. For acoustic pieces, some of this may have already happened! When I was sat in the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, waiting for the hour to strike so I could record the bells ringing in 2011 or just last month in St Augustine’s Tower in Hackney. Or, I might go out to acquire sounds, sticking microphones to clothes washing machines, or in refrigerators, or to get the squeal of breaks at Tower Hill Station. Perhaps, even going further afield for your composition, dangling microphones just into the edge of active volcanoes, to get the sound of it melting! I don’t re-use sounds, so whatever sounds I’ve gathered for your piece will only be in your piece.
For analogue sounds, I’ll probably start plugging cables into my synthesiser, but might try a zero input mixer going to a chaotic filter bank. No to patches are alike. It’s nearly impossible to recapture a patch once it’s unplugged, even if I wanted to. For folks after digital sounds, I’ll fire up SuperCollider and start creating a timbres and a tuning to go with them – based on a bespoke tuning algorithm. (Which I should really publish a paper about, actually. If you want to try it yourself, its in the TuningLib quark.)
Once I have a base layer of sounds, I’ll start manipulating them, either varying their sounds for the minute duration or finding extra sounds to go with them. Obviously a minute is not very long, but well over a hundred discrete events can happen in that time, all of which must be related to each other in order to make musical sense, but different from each other in order for progression. What features will vary over the minute and by how much? What sonic glue needs to hold the thing together?
Usually, for a one minute piece, I’ll have three major sonic ideas, all of which will be closely related to each other.
Every piece comes with program notes explaining how it was made, where the ideas came from and how it was assembled. For digital pieces, the source code to create it is also available! You can find examples of past commissions, including recordings and program notes on my podcast.
I started making one minute pieces in 2007, when I was in a bit of a rut and bored by everything. I didn’t want to listen to anything for very long. I ordered my iTunes library by duration and only listened to stuff that was less than two minutes long. If I only wanted to listen to such short pieces, it stood to reason I should only write such short pieces. But while working on them, the possibilities of the duration just began to expand. I was spending about 4 hours to write a minute and that time investment was getting longer and longer, as more and more subtlety and opportunities for expressiveness became clear.
I took a break from writing shorts, not because I wanted to, but because my supervisor told me that my PhD could not be all one minute pieces. so, reluctantly, I began working on longer pieces again.
Why have I come back to this short duration? Not just because of the wealth of possibilities, but also because of extreme personal grumpiness. Your music is handmade by a curmudgeon in Hackney.
But why should you want a minute of noise? Because it’s the best duration for grumpy people! Even somebody with an attitude that could sour milk will find a minute to enjoy a hand crafted piece of noise. Your friends and associates will all be happy to listen for one minute. A minute is accessible on many occasions! You can spare a minute to listen to something. This is noise music for busy professionals, for people who are new to noise or for folks who just like miniatures. Short noise pieces make great gifts. Order now and delivery is guaranteed in time for Christmas or Hanukkah. Act now to get the sale price of just £5 for one piece!

Music comissioning is back!

Folks, I’m offering up to 30 commissions this November of 1 minute long noise music pieces. You as the commissioner get to name the piece. Your role as titler and commissioner will be mentioned in the program notes. If you commission a piece as a gift, or in honour of another person or of an event, the person and/or event will also be mentioned in the program notes. A new piece of music will be created, just for you! Within a week, you will get a copy of the piece emailed to you in the audio format of your choice (MP3, AIFF, WAV, Apple Lossless, AAC) and have one week in which to come up with a title (I reserve the right to nix titles that I deem offensive). I retain copyright, but the piece will be released under a Creative Commons Share Music License, so you (and the honoree) can share the piece with friends via CD or the internet.
As a special feature for this burst of commissions, you can optionally specify if you want your piece to be acoustic, analogue or digital. Also, optionally, let me know if you might use the piece as a ringtone to ensure it gets composed to sound good and loud coming from a mobile phone. All commissions will be delivered in time for Christmas or Hanukkah.
The introductory price for the first 5 is £5. This will go up shortly, so act now to get it. This is for digital delivery only. You are free to burn your piece of music on to CDs and give them away to friends, but if you want a signed CD from me, that’s also possible for an extra £3 + postage.
Get it from my Etsy shop!

Why restart this project?

I still need a few more short pieces before I can put out the long-awaited CD of shorts. And also, the last time I did this, I was in a bit of a rut where I hadn’t really written anything for a while and it got my composing again, so hopefully, that will also work again now.

Trying out Samaritans Radar

I’ve (temporarily) signed up for the Samaritans Radar app. I thought this would be a smartphone app, but it’s not. It’s a little twitter app that reads posts looking for keywords and sends an email if it sees anything it thinks might be alarming.
I’ve got two notifications so far. The first one comes from a tweet from before I added the app:

Oh, irony is not dead.
The other notification was for this tweet:

It sent me an email about 20 minutes after that was first posted, which is a bit late for a ‘I’m going to kill myself … right now’, but possibly ok for people building up more slowly. (A later notification for a different tweet arrived after only 7 minutes.) Gmail autofiltered the email to my Updates tab, which means it did not generate an alert on my phone. All of the updates I got have been in a single thread, so I could move it to the primary inbox if I were concerned.
The email told me:

Dear @celesteh,

Radar has spotted a tweet from someone you follow who may be going through a tough time.

Read the tweet here and find out how you can offer support.

View Tweet Now

If you need more information on how to help your friend or if you need some support yourself, please visit www.Samaritans.org

Clicking through on the ‘View tweet now’ takes me to a web page.

My Radar

Hi @celesteh
This is the tweet that Radar has spotted

Are you worried about this Tweet?
[yes] [no]

Clicking yes gets a small pop up window overlaying the tweet in question:

What to do:

You’ve indicated that the tweet might be worrying. Here are some tips on what to do next:

  • Have a look at their tweets, is this a one off? Out of character? Has it been going on for long?
  • Try sending them a tweet (or perhaps a DM, Email, Text?) gently asking how they’re doing.
  • Could a mutual friend have the same worries and help approach them together?

You might want to try and meet up with your friend, or arrange a time to chat on the phone?

  • Offer Samaritans contact details and suggest they call if they want to speak to someone anonymously : 08457 90 90 90
  • For more information and help with knowing what to say visit www.samaritans.org/radar

And that’s it. None of the pages had any queries or information relating to the nature of different relationships I might have with the potentially troubled tweeter. For example, if I got a tweet like that about an underling that I line-manage or have power over at work, that is not addressed. Nor is any mention made of the equalities act.
This tool does not give me access to any information I did not already have access to. It only shows me tweets already visible in my timeline. Therefore, concerns that it could out somebody as trans or LGB do seem misplaced, as it only shows me what people have already decided I should be able to see. I don’t know, but I suspect it will also work with protected tweets, so it will send me alerts about tweets that aren’t public, but, again, the person decided I could already see them. (This does raise larger concerns about how twitter apps run by big data companies are a way of circumventing privacy controls set by individual users.)
Again, this app draws my attention to tweets that would have been in my timeline anyway, but that I may have missed because of the massive volume of tweets that go by, or I may have scrolled past it without noticing. I can see why the Samaritans were surprised by people getting upset about privacy concerns, as this is much less invasive than is all of facebook or a lot of other twitter-based data gathering.

Previously on this topic: Posting to the Internet

Posting to the internet

I’m seeing a lot of people upset over an app made by the Samaritans. This is a twitter app that listens for some keywords and phrases that might indicate if one of your contacts is having a hard time. If they are, it gives you some nudges to reach out to offer them some support. This is obviously well-intentioned, but many are concerned about potential misuse, for example, by employers who want to discriminate against people, or bullies.
I would think the vast majority of people installing an app like this have good intentions. If your manager sees that you’re having a rough time via this app, well, they’re already following you on twitter and could very easily stumble across your unhappy posts by accident. Having this app indicates that they at least like the idea of supporting people, but, yeah, they could very well make poor decisions about what to do with a struggling underling. It’s not clear whether this app makes that any more likely. It does call attention to possibly unhappy tweets by the employee, but hopefully a well-intentioned manager is aware of the Equalities Act (and hopefully this scenario occurred to the programmers, in the user interaction between the app and the concerned person).
The bully argument is a bit more troubling, as, alas, it’s all too easy to imagine someone installing this just to keep tabs on varied target lists. This linked post is concerned about transphobic abuse, which is all too common, but its also easy to imagine this being exploited by GamerGate. In the hands of sociopath, this use is, indeed, troubling. However, it is merely automatic a task that they’re possibly already doing manually.
I think people’s major concern is the inherent creepiness of a piece of software following you and attempting to diagnose your mood and mental health problems via your public posts. This concern is not misplaced, but the targeting the Samaritans probably is. The truth is, untold numbers of apps do this already. We don’t know how many, because they’re under no obligation to tell us. Twitter makes available via their API a raw stream of everything posted to twitter. Every single post in real time. You or I cannot make use of so many tweets blasting out at us, but Big Data can.
Right now, there are programs running, looking at twitter, scanning every single tweet. They are looking for patterns. Some of this is completely benign. In the relatively recent earthquake in Napa, California, analysts were able to use tweet times and geolocation to figure out where the quake was big enough to wake people up. A lot of people, after making sure they were safe, reached for their smart devices and tweeted they’d felt the earthquake. Researchers were able to make a very nifty map, showing where it woke up the most people to where it seemed to waken virtually no one. That’s nifty, right? But it does require doing a lot of looking at where people are and whether they would normally be tweeting at that time of night. It’s not an invasion of privacy, because it’s public and maybe it doesn’t seem squeamish at all, but this is an unusual example.
Many twitter applications are looking for mentions of brands and what emotive words are used next to them. Many years ago, I tried to get a job blogging for a brand and they mailed me in the information pack every single public live journal post that mentioned their brand. All of them were public, but many of them were kind of embarrassingly personal. The authors never imagined them being disseminated to corporate types. This same thing still goes on, but a much more massive scale.
And its not unheard of to try to trace individuals. Target’s datamining certainly includes twitter.
We’re fine with giant corporations, security agencies and, yes, our bosses knowing everything we tweet. How do I know we’re fine with it? We all use twitter and nobody objects. Until some well-meaning do-gooder tries to make an accessible, helpful version of this.
Twitter’s entire business model relies on sharing this kind of information. This is not a case where they could be reformed into better behaviour. If you don’t want to be mined and you don’t want to tweet anonymously, consider using a privacy aware service to make posts like this – one that will share your tweets only with the people you say you want them shared with. So if you’re having a really really rubbish day and post, ‘I feel so down today, I’m at a loss and just don’t know how long I can carry on’ it will be seen by the people you want it to be seen by and not everyone on the entire internet and not a corporation out to sell your moods and data to anyone who will buy it.
If you want privacy control for posts, use Disapora for them. If you want the world and everyone to know what you’re thinking, use Twitter. There are times were it makes sense to use either. But even if this app gets withdrawn with muttered apologies, don’t assume you know who is reading your tweets. They’re public and anybody could be – and certainly is – gathering them.