A British PhD student has compiled an album of digitally written music composed for Twitter - each song is made up of 140 characters or less.

Dan Stowell, a digital-music student at Queen Mary, University of London's School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, compiled the album called sc140. It features 22 pieces from artists around the world, who each kept to the strict 140-character limit imposed by Twitter. The 140-charatcer tweets result in musical pieces that are up to five minutes long.

"The 140-character limit is pretty extreme, so I was impressed by many of the results," says Stowell in a post about the selections on the album.

The artists composed their pieces using Stowell's SuperCollider programming language that creates synthesis algorithms to tell a computer what sound to make. Stowell started posting fragments of pieces he wrote with SuperCollider on Twitter, and followers took off with the idea, he says.

Sc140 represents some of the best pieces posted on the micro-blogging site, he says.

Both the album and the source code are available for free download here.