IBM works with the US Tennis Association to collect data from the US Open and analyze how all the players are performing. It's a great opportunity to show off the power of the IBM Cloud, so they asked us to think of a cool way to advertise the scope, speed and strength of their technology to a non-technical audience of Millennial sports fans. Inspired by the inherent rhythm of a tennis match, we came up with the idea to turn the tennis data into music.

Our campaign was part art project, part science experiment. We partnered with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem and developers from digital production company Tool to do the really, really hard work of pulling it off. As data streamed in from the tournament, a cloud-based algorithm turned James’s pre-selected beats into live soundtracks, and music was made in real time from over a hundred tennis matches.

James made a remix album of his favorite tracks. Pitchfork reviewed it and gave it a 6.9 (so like a 7.) We were written up in the New York Times and featured on Google Creative Sandbox. And when Rolling Stone quoted my track description copy in in their article about our project, I snorted coffee out of my nose.

Here's the remix album:

We made lots of content around this project, like the video below. I conducted interviews, pieced together transcripts, sat with editors and figured out how to turn all our footage into a cohesive, character-driven story that seemed less IBM and more MTV.

As the sole writer on the project during production, I also wrote most of the copy on the US Open Sessions website, where all the music streamed during and after the tournament. You can catch some of it in this walkthrough and see it up-close here.

*Silver and bronze winner at The One Show; Graphite pencil winner at D&AD; Webby nominee; FWA Site of the Day.