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.

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.

This is usually how I fall asleep.

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

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...

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