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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

Love this. A project I've had in mind for a while but realistically will never get around to building is an ambient/coding music generator that's hooked up to a metric, e.g. your project's latency, autoscale size, error rate, potentially controlling different instruments.

It would be fun to be able to subconsciously monitor your system without staring at graphs.

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A long time ago, a friend mentioned this exact same idea! The analogy he used was how steam engine operators became so familiar with their machines that they could tell what was going on just by listening. I'm not sure if we can really do the same with services, but it's a fun thought experiment.

At one place I worked at back in the 1970s there was a speaker on the mainframe (it may have just been a transistor radio picking up interference) and you could get some idea of what the machine was doing from the sound.

That was how the earliest computer music was made. You could play notes with loops that included varying numbers of no-ops to set the pitch.

Very Nullsoft Beep.

https://www.1014.org/code/nullsoft/nbeep/

You can sort of do this with a modern computer. The CPU and GPU fans spin up on increased load, and you can listen to the hard drive (the sounds correspond to some degree to the HDD indicator light). Over time you can get an idea of system activity just by listening to the machine itself.

Hansen and Rubin did something like this in 2001 [1]. I have some audio samples of their program's product from monitoring the Lucent site at 6 AM, noon, and 2:30 PM - decidedly different sounds at each time.

Edit: The page on Hansen's website about this project (Listening Post) is available in archive.org, but without any audio samples alas [2]

[1] http://legacy.spa.aalto.fi/icad2001/proceedings/papers/hanse...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20020414095256fw_/http://www.ear...

That's a cool idea. Something that was suggested to me with Flowful was to use some sort of body triggers, perhaps from facial recgonition through your device's camera, to determine when the user was becoming less focused. The music could then adapt to help them get back on track.

So many cool possibilities.

XD yes! I want to jack my earbuds into the stock market: time and sales frequency denoting tempo and trade volume denoting dynamics; with a real time candle analyzer modulating between keys. Each company would be a different song!

When I was younger, I was into autohotkey. My PC would go off because of a powercut and the ups failed in 4-8 minutes while beeping. Found "tonedet" or something that listens to a specific tone and does something via ahk which in my case was proper shutdown. That was a success.

Then I thought of a project that would give me status via soundbeep,500,400.

I never got around to doing that but it wouldn't have been half bad.

Three small beeps in a succession, repeat, internet is down or some combination of deep or low beeps to say something else.

AHK brings back old memories. Used to play around a lot with AHK, an app called "WhenThen" and Windows XP skins among others.

I remember the first time I assembled a PC (nineties), listening to motherboard beeps and comparing against the (printed) manual to work out what was wrong.

https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/beep-codes

My initial EE Senior project proposal (back in the early 90's) was a biofeedback controlled music generator. The idea was to use a Markov chain (not that I knew that term, but I'd heard of the concept) to produce tone sequences, then use biofeedback to alter the probabilities to encourage relaxation. With my luck, it probably would have devolved into a metronome, but I was young and naive.

I ended up failing out of college (I was young and stupid, too) and when I returned 5 years later I ended up changing my senior project to a leg controller for a hexapod robot.

Sounds great until you start hearing boss-level music!

Then it starts sounding even better!

That reminds me of Douglas Adams’ fictional Anthem “spreadsheet”, that generated corporate anthems from business data… :)

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