This reminds me of a project I did a few years ago:

"Stockify is a live music service that follows the mood of the stock markets. It plays happy music only when the stock is going up and sad music when it’s going down." https://vimeo.com/310372406

(it's of course a parody, but I made a functional prototype)

I know someone who uses tones as an easy way of knowing if there's a market move on some cryptocurrencies. Basically, there's different tones for a trade that traded higher than previous and for a trade that traded lower than the previous. Possibly pitch or volume or something was used to indicate the volume of the trade, I don't quite remember. Either way, he could quickly hear if there was a major market move or something just by the amount and tone of the beeps. He used this as a way to know then he should look at the chart or whatever.

We spend a lot of time training digital computers to deal with analog information that has been converted into digital forms, and I wonder how much we could also gain by finding better ways to convert digital information into analog forms that our brains (as analog computers) can better parse.

Oh you're also friends with Gilfoyle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS1KcjkWdoU

Hahaha I forgot about this

I had a related idea, to make a running program produce an audible hum like a car engine would. And the hum would vary depending on what paths of the program are executing, so you get an idea what/how your code is "doing" by listening in.

This is what NPR does on the market segment (Kai Rysdal?) The background music reflects the changes in the market over the day.

Also, if you haven't read Douglas Adam's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", there's a good subplot around this exact idea.

That's what I thought too.

I guess someone needs to do it now, hm...

(But: I think live db-activity rendered to music as a kind of monitoring mechanism is potentially way cooler than just getting db updates over a web socket.)

You can listen to GitHub commits: https://github.audio/

This is usually how I fall asleep.

This is how you guarantee your child will become an ace coder. The fractal audio will transform key centers in the developing brain, and give them subliminal knowledge of all major repos of note

Same here. App idea geared at DevOps: ambient sound scape generator based on monitoring events, e.g. from Datadog.

We have this in New York City to monitor the flow of traffic on quiet residential streets. If the flow rate is OK, it's nice and quiet. If the flow rate gets too low (or a traffic light turns red) then a chorus of very angry car horns erupts, and you are jolted out of your train of thought, wishing you had the guts / tolerance for prison time to run outside and smash every single one of the cars with a crowbar.

I think a recording of this is actually built into Pagerduty to use as a sound when you're getting paged. I went with the "golf ball hit into a flock of geese" one, though. Every time that goes off my first thought is "OH GOD I'M DYING HELP" but then I look and it's just GCP down again. Ironically therapeutic.

There is an implementation and a paper called peep, the network auralizer. I've been thinking of building something like this in rust or go as a learning project, but audio streaming and mixing is harder than I thought. If someone has good libraries or tutorials there, I'd be grateful.

http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

Techno livestream. BPM increases when your website gets high traffic.

Similar: Solaris's snoop (tcpdump equivalent) with the -a option:

Listen to packets on /dev/audio (warning: can be noisy).

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23823_01/html/816-5166/snoop-1m....

You’ve got to throw in some uncompressed pcm audio streams just to keep it interesting.

When we were learning Linux a friend and I used to pipe /dev/hda into /dev/dsp for fun and when we hit some fragments of uncompressed piano recordings we joked that we must have hit the kernel source code. Good times.

Same here and I am slightly disappointed it's not what I thought it was.

Same. Figured pop-pop-poppop-pop could be the background noise when we go back to the office...