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Comment by robbomacrae | Hacker News Reader

I've often wished there was a way programming could produce art as a by product. That way we could see something more tangible for our efforts, have a landmark system for help recalling it all, and show progress to our non technical family members.

This has made me think that making music as a by product would also be pretty neat.. being able to hear different sounds for different functions would be a much more intuitive way of inspecting the overall health and performance of your system than trudging through logs.

If anyone knows of anything like this I would be happy to pay for it!

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So it's not exactly what you're talking about, but the Parkes radio telescope used to have it's control system wired up with speakers and the control software used Australian animal sounds for various statuses and errors. So when things went well it would sound like a peaceful wilderness.

Supposedly after a while, you could tell how things were going by the shift in the animal sounds, even for minor shifts from normal operation. And of course the various alerts used loud noises like panicked Kookaburra (if I'm recalling correctly), so those definitely got the attention of even novice operators.

A colleague of mine had set up an audio alarm which would go off every time a build failed. It made everyone a lot more cautious when they checked in their code.

What’s that awful noise in the background, getting louder and louder?

Oh, that? We just ignore it. They call it technical debt.

This idea is hilarious. If only every function was given a sound so you could hear a cacophony of mistakes every time it was run. Imagine a programmer Bach, someone who could somehow weave a beautiful rhythm into their standard library function calls.

Hold an AM radio next to your motherboard sometime. There were certain elders, long passed to the Grey (Beard) Havens, who claimed they could debug their programs that way.

My uncle made alarm go off when somebody opens a gate in my parents fence years ago. He used old auto alarm. It sounds like a submarine about to launch torpedoes:)

We learnt to ignore it in a few months, but it's funny when guests hear it for the first time.

A cool one is Gource, which creates a fancy visualization of your codebase's history: https://gource.io/

Looks pretty cool. Thanks!

I guess you just need a PC from the early/mid 1990's with a soundblaster/clone sound card. Those cards overwhelmingly didn't have good power filters on their audio amps/etc and when the gain was turned up a bit you could hear the ISA/PCI bus noise.

I remember my PC made very distinct noises when scrolling text, compiling, and various other operations.

I vaguly remember a reading somewhere a couple years ago that someone had hooked up a click noise to linux syscalls and context switches for this basic purpose.

I just wish machines still had disk I/O leds. My laptop (a dell) is one of the last machines I've seen with a disk activity led, because it switches the charge led to disk activity with a fn key combination.

Also, if you want satisfaction there are various industries where computers are used to control mechanical devices. I worked in one where a large robot was being controlled by our software. Nothing more exciting than writing some code and hearing that think whirl and clunk away. Or somewhat frequently banging against end stops and the like when we had bugs.

Are you familiar with the demo scene?

A little. Isn't the point of the demo to be the visual? Which to be fair, is like how the original post purpose is the music itself. But I was thinking something that happened as a happy accidental extra result of whatever you're doing with auto generated visual representations of how your code fits together like some Escher contraption.

The demoscene exhibits and competes on music and hardware as well as graphics. There are a couple of demos which do all three, running on homemade or modded hardware.

> I've often wished there was a way programming could produce art as a by product

That's pretty much what computer graphics programming is.

Check out [Sonic Pi](https://sonic-pi.net/). It’s a self-described “code-based music creation and performance tool”.

I’ve noodled around with it a bit, and it’s pretty cool.

Yes I suppose sonic pi could be used to map logs to an audio stream. I might have to tinker with this. Thanks!

wow, that's quite something!

>a friendly tutorial

>54,019 words 307,466 characters

it's basically a flat file docs

Programming producing art - something like this? https://dgopstein.github.io/articles/ioccc-ascii-art/

There's this Twitter hashtag for buggy D3 code that generated some art by accident :)

https://twitter.com/search?q=%23d3brokeandmadeart

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