Lofi air traffic control – LAX | Hacker News Reader

Lofi air traffic control – LAX

lofiatc.com

607 pointshot_gril129 comments

This is great. I'd love this with the same style radio chatter, but from a bot that watches my news sources, tweets, emails, and radios itself to discuss interesting things happening.

"An email just came in at 0743 AM from Steve.. over" ... "Yeah that looks like an interesting followup to the one from John last week. Someone should reply to this one. Over."

Hear, hear. A real side project opportunity!

It would require some APIs to be incorporated, and I'd really appreciate if that would be done locally, but… Sounds cool!

Oh this would be awesome. For very long time I’ve been looking for an unintrusive way to receive important notifications on time. And since I almost always listen to music this would work well.

The search for a perfect notification system for a large org is like a chemical clock reaction, which swings back and forth between states of equilibrium.

No one in an org will ever be on the same page, as people work on different tasks.

Some tasks are repetitive and allow you to dip your attention in and out.

Other tasks might require deep thought (like composition and putting words to a document) where your thoughts and output can’t be mixed with the sound of others coming in.

It works for truckers/pilots because the input/output by workers is relatively the same and compatible with background “noise”, but this metaphor breaks down as soon as the type of work changes.

Some others have mentioned SomaFM and the Apollo missions separately, but SomaFM has a station that combines ambient music and the Apollo mission audio: https://somafm.com/missioncontrol/

I didn’t know I needed this in my life until now. Thanks!

Are there any feeds of live current space mission audio?

If you like soma, also check out blue mars: http://echoesofbluemars.org/

edit: just been listening to that Apollo channel - fascinating recordings.

Soma is such a great station! If you are a Hardcore listener some channels might appear a bit repetitive from time to time but in my experience this self corrects over time.

This (well EHAM) is one of my standard daily listens whilst WFH. That and the Flying Fortress over at MyNoise (a service I pay for) https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/propellerNoiseGenerator.ph...

MyNoise is the best. Stéphane seems like such a respectful, down-to-earth guy. I don’t pay for many subscriptions—I go out of my way to avoid them—but I put some good money into MyNoise regularly because it’s been such a valuable service. It’s optional—I don’t actually use many of the paid features—but I appreciate it so dang much.

Boston College's FM station WZBC has a program No Commercial Potential, which plays lots of experimental sounds, some of it sounds like MyNoise Flying Fortress. Everything depends on the DJ and their mood, but some of it has this vibe.

https://www.wzbc.org/after-hours-ncp

EHAM tower or the high speed ballet of the radar guys?

HAHA - I came here to say the same (I pay for it as well, and I love the flying fortress with radio chatter...

I just spent some time adding layers of sound to the actual ATC chatter, then I add individual layers, like distant thunder, b29, singing bowls and rain etc...

https://i.imgur.com/8jJkh1B.png

Ill try to share an MP3...

Super cool. United used to let passengers listen to the flight's atc comms, which I really liked. Then they merged with Continental and got rid of it. I always wondered why the took away that feature.

I recently saw a video where ATC made a mistake and nearly let two planes get too close (one landing, another taking off, on crossing runways). They caught it in time (some ATC automated checking system was still doing its announcement as the controller saw and diverted them both) but hearing that as a passenger, I can imagine the panic that's not going to help anyone.

Don't know if that is the reason, or if that's even a legitimate reason (it's about your life after all, even if you're powerless to save it), but I could imagine that being a consideration.

Have an air traffic controller tell you that your about to die would seem unlikely to be a panic inducing event. The level of calm in utter carnage is very much a thing. I’d prefer not to test this theory.

That reminds me about that one JetBlue emergency landing where passengers could watch their own plane attempt a landing.

IIRC, the flight attendants disabled the system right at landing to prevent presumed panic. That decisions amusing to me since there’s a 15-30 second delay with satellite TV anyway. I can’t imagine there was a true opportunity for passengers to see anything scary in this scenario.

There's an informative video on YouTube about that JetBlue incident and the (successful) attempt to recover from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rpsgn9LM0G8

Reading your comment, my flippantly ironic thought was that it's just as well real life isn't delayed from the satellite TV; that could really cause some panic in the cabin!

Here is a similar deep dive into such an incident.

https://fallows.substack.com/p/as-bad-as-it-gets-without-bod...

These happen pretty often, and go unreported. So there's not much benefit in people finding out, on the downside there's bad PR.

I do some minor piloting myself and I don't think those things go unreported often. Maybe uncontrollable dirt airports -- yes, sure.

But in class Bravo, with hundreds of souls on board, when all transmissions are recorded and public, and multiple plane watchers listen to them in real time -- not a chance.

Know-it-all PPLs on the flight giving other passengers blow by blow commentary while critiquing the captain. That and not wanting pax to think about being in an aluminum tube traveling 0.7 Mach while in said tube.

I used to have some fear of flying, and listening to channel 9 helped me get over it, because I learned more about how safe and expected turbulence was, and how familiar everyone was with the various procedures and in-flight events.

I'm not sure everyone would have the same reaction, but I found it very calming. Maybe the fact that people like to listen to ATC conversations in order to relax is a good sign for the likely effects on many passengers.

It's true that you could occasionally learn about an error or a dangerous event that you wouldn't otherwise have been aware of at all, but I also think many passengers would be impressed by how professionally problems are usually handled. I've been on two flights that had to divert (for a bird strike and a passenger medical issue, respectively) and one flight that had a missed approach and go-around (in very high crosswinds), and, while none of them had channel 9, I'm quite confident that ATC was prepared to handle these situations and that many passengers would also have been impressed to have heard those conversations.

I'm happy to admit that getting more information about what's going on wouldn't always be comfortable or reassuring to everyone, though.

Same here. I’ve watched a lot of air accident breakdowns and read more than a few NTSB reports. The way safety is a core of commercial aviation is just incredible and so far beyond everything I see in daily life. The way cars are handle is positively horrific.

0.7 mach would be pretty slow for a commercial airliner these days. Mach 0.8-0.9 is typical now.

Written like a know-it-all PPL.

They didn't take it away completely, but it's now at the flight crews discretion. You can kindly ask a flight attendant to ask the pilot if they will have channel 9 on or ask if they will.

Found this about it[0], but there is still the occasional person asking about it on FF boards and the answer is still, to politely ask the FA about it

[0] https://simpleflying.com/united-airlines-channel-9-story/

I'll have to ask next time. That said the article is quite wrong in that you can't hear conversation in the cockpit, only conversation on the active frequency. You could never and probably will never hear pilot to copilot conversation.

Guess I wasn't paying attention to it, I skimmed it since I fly United often and already knew what it actually was (not pilot conversation). Wasn't sure about posting a specific thread from www.flyertalk.com [0] probably should have just posted that. I dont usually have much luck with it, but I only remember half the time to ask.

[0] https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-airlines-mileageplus/...

When this was previously posted, some of the commenters mentioned that this might be breaking the LiveATC TOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35126914

And then other commenters, namely myself, actually read the TOS and realized that there's no reason to think that.

There's no reason not to think that either as far as I can see from that thread.

Everything on that site is fine by the TOS so long as she had permission to use the streams. Since the site has been up for 2 years, I think it's pretty safe to assume she got permission.

SomaFM has https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/sf1033 (ambient with real-time chat from LAPD) and https://somafm.com/player/#/now-playing/missioncontrol (ambient and Houston old chit-chat I think).

They also have this new n5md channel that has sooooo many good tracks :).

I don't get Lofi, it's way too sad/nostalgic to me to be relaxing but the oversound here is okay (for a bit).

edit: BUT. Sometimes somaFM will sing tunes that sounds like Ross from Friends or weird 32 minutes "dzing-dzin" loop. When it happens I click on "wtf ?!" in the app and switch to another channel (that I flood with "I love this").

> Sometimes somaFM will sing tunes that sounds like Ross from Friends

Add a laugh track and your descent into hell will be complete.

Just so everybody understands, there's an actual band named "Ross from Friends".

I was way off track, Sorry.

Well, you were not ! I didn't know about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_from_Friends, I was thinking about that particular segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLa8Br569gA&t=90s (laugh track included).

I love lofi streams on YT. I especially love them combined with ambient nature bathing.

Something about it is sad/nostalgic, for sure. But when you get that ambient nature bathing in there, it becomes, to me, more hopeful and ... healing, in a way. Nostalgia is still there, but more of the hopeful/relaxing vibes than the sad ones.

I got way into them during lockdowns, obviously, but have kept it up. The trick is finding a real nature bathing track. Not just some soundboards that loop or are set at random. Real high quality audio from real places over hours of time are rare, but very worth it. My post history has more on the specific tracks I've found, with a few other commenters chipping in every once in a while.

You get a bit more wanderlust, tempered by the lofi. It's a strange brew, but gets me through the days.

I love these stations. SomaFM carries this and others (or maybe they are just similar mash-ups). I have tinnitus 100% of the time, and silence is the enemy. This kind of sound - indistinct, with variety and high frequencies, is the most helpful.

Very reminiscent of the soma FM station where they have music over an SF police scanner.

Speaking about an opposite thing: am I the only one who gets terribly distracted by any hint of human speech in the ambient sounds? In my case, it completely destroys concentration; my mind immediately switches to listening mode, trying to understand the speech and tune in to the conversation.

This is why I only listen to the instrumental music during work, and pain to hear an occasional phrase dropped into a perfectly good IDM / synthwave / electronica track. I wish a "speech-free" tag existed e.g. on Bandcamp; some artists helpfully put annotations on their albums, e.g. Master Boot Record's "100% dehumanized", but apparently most artists and likely listeners do not see the presence of words as a large differentiator.

I know 2-3 of my friends who exhibit a similar effect. I wonder if it's rare, or not so rare but not noticed much.

I definitely get where you are coming from. I've been known to listen to music in languages I don't know as a bit of a work around for that.

I even get distracted by those.

Lol I started listening to Spanish music to work around that issue as well, but when I listen to the same song so long I can get used to it, plus I speak a basic level of Spanish.

Same here. Switching to Japanese helped, until I achieved a basic level of Japanese. This also killed Korean lyrics, because Korean sounds similar enough to Japanese to trigger my attention, but I can't understand a word! :-D

True, but on the other hand I also get distracted at instruments x) Classical music especially is a no-no, I'll get too interested and stop paying attention to what I'm doing lol.

However, ambient sounds are perfect. I'll never get tired of plugging this: mynoise.net

Yup, same here. It's why I also mostly listen to instrumental music. A lot of Aphex Twin. On top of that, when I listen to (catchy) music with lyrics, it keeps looping in the background of my brain non-stop, sometimes multiple days. A positive -sort of related- thing: it's very easy for me to listen to audio-books while driving or doing other things and not miss anything because I'm so focused on the speech.

Me too, but only when my work involves words. When I was in photoshop all day I listened to podcasts constantly and did fine.

It looks like working with text and listening to speech requires the same language-processing brain circuitry, and it's not optimized for parallel processing.

I experience something similar, but it seems to have more to do with *how familiar* I am with the song. If it's something I've never heard before, it's much more distracting- even if it doesn't have words. On the other hand, if I've listened to it a lot, it seems to have the opposite effect, and helps me concentrate.

I get this when trying to fall asleep, too: I can't fall asleep while watching something new! But give me an episode of Futurama I've watched about six hundred and thirty-two times, and I'll be out like a light. :)

That being said, this site is interesting because the speech is somewhat less distinct and has the odd cadence of aviation radio. I'll give it a listen for awhile and see if I get the same effect as you.

This effect of media familiarity is exactly the same for me: I can be very creating when listening to an old playlist, but can't think at all when listening to something new.

Not all people seem to be like this though, as I have friends that listen to the radio/randomly recommended Spotify songs at work.

I have this, but I also love lyrical music as opposed to just instrumental tracks. My solution was listening to music in languages I don't understand (French, Icelandic, etc) where there's still the tonal patterns and vocal layering, but doesn't flip my brain into "speech processing" mode.

This has been studied before and it seems that yes your brain has trouble ignoring music with lyrics.

Based on this study[1] you lose at least 10 IQ points when studying and listening to music with lyrics.

[1] https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa15/2015/12/04/listening-to-class...

Hrm. The study's size of 25 participants, and the inherent variance of IQ score estimation both seem to smell more of a confirmation bias than a legit anything else.

No, it's absolutely normal. It's difficult to ignore voices.

The same way it's difficult to tell the color of a written word if the word itself is a color.

> am I the only one who gets terribly distracted by any hint of human speech in the ambient sounds? In my case, it completely destroys concentration

I’m the same, which is why my favorite ambient music for work is black metal. You still get music that mirrors how troubleshooting kubernetes makes you feel, but you couldn’t hear the lyrics if you tried :-)

...and it also contains mysterious unholy-sounding incantations, like some kubectl command line full of literal hex.

Late 10s Chillwave works for me though

Same. That's why when I'm working, I listen to either classical music, or metal music where the words are unintelligible.

Indeed, some classical choir parts apparently have highly significant lyrics, but even discerning words boundaries in these walls of sound is so hard that it does not trigger my comprehension.

I was just thinking exactly the same thing - this is nice, but _so_ distracting. I typically listen to the Lounge channel on DI.FM for happy chillout background vibes that don’t distract

https://listentothe.cloud/ Is my favorite. There’s something really soothing about certain regional accents and the rhythm of their comms. I really liked Hong Kong but it always seems to be offline now.

Great vibe. My only gripe is the music doesn't seem to be lofi at all, just like slow beats. Maybe it's just where I'm at in the playlist though.

I noticed that the KLAX audio feed is in stereo and isolates the voice chatter to either the left or the right channel. Which might be confusing on headphones.

I'm not sure how it's determined what audio goes to each channel but it seems very intentional. I'm guessing this is a way of listening to to multiple overlapping channels. Does anyone know more about this? Is separating radio chatter into distinct channels and listening over stereo something air traffic controllers do in practice or is that just for the benefit of this feed?

p.s. here's just the KLAX feed without the lofi beats: https://s1-bos.liveatc.net/klax_twr

South tower (runways 25L & 25R) and North tower (runways 24L & 24R) are on different frequencies. On LiveATC you can listen to each tower individually.

Not sure if air traffic controllers do it but pilots do. Often will have one radio on in the left ear and another in the right. The newer audio panels will do “3d audio” so it’s more spatial.

When you have it this way, it’s easier for your brain to ignore one when you are paying attention to the other.

> Not sure if air traffic controllers do it but pilots do. Often will have one radio on in the left ear and another in the right.

It sounds very general, that pilots do, and often. I guess it is missing a "some", "few", and/or "I" somewhere.

Of all the various headset connectors [0], only redel/lemo and (probably) fischer are stereo. That's a very small part of the complete GA fleet, and likely even lower in commercial (if modern, using 5-pin XLR).

edit: Looks like U174 is stereo, too.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_headset_con...

Why is this so strangely relaxing? What an amazing idea.

Mixing high-quality full-spectrum audio with low-quality and small-spectrum voice always sound neat :)

The measured and calm voice of ATC and pilots probably just makes it better, it always sound like they have everything 100% under control.

“Contact” on the Random Access Memories album does this well. [1]

That entire song makes me picture a white knuckling unscheduled re-entry followed by nail biting waiting, concluded by a successful splash down.

[1] https://youtu.be/JI5noh4OyXc

It's relaxing until they start speaking paragraphs very fast, over and over, then it feels stressful ):

Try Narita. https://www.lofiatc.com/?icao=RJAA

The HN submission page could play something like this in the background to soothe people while they are preparing their angry submissions.

Heh, who am I kidding, HN runs on outrage just like all the other social networks.

Now I'm imagining a writing/journaling app that automatically chooses a playlist based on the emotions or concepts detected in the writing.

related - from 12(!) years ago

http://youarelisteningtolosangeles.com/

It expanded to other cities. Montreal police meant I wasn't distracted since I don't speak French.

If you're interested in listening to more ATC stuff, LiveATC[0] is a pretty good service for listening in while at airports or on a plane (or just while sitting around). I use it when traveling for fun, and it works really well! (The only issue is figuring out what frequency your aircraft is on)

[0]: https://www.liveatc.net/

Search doesn't accept city-names but ... if you find the 3-letter IATA airport-code for a particular city (say Pittsburg, PIT)... search for it with a K in front of it (KPIT), it's got many of them.

US: https://www.airportcodes.us/us-airports.htm

(Edit: At KFNT, e.g., you'll find much less talk !)

None of the airport feeds I've tried have worked, unfortunately.

KJFK was the only one that loaded immediately and had ATC comms going. KEWR took forever to load and even when Live nothing was coming through.

KLAX South Tower has a pretty decent of traffic from what I've noticed.

I've been listening to this all day. If you're the creator of this OP, thank you, it's very good.

Being able to adjust the volume of the music and radio is an underrated and greatly appreciated feature. Great job whoever made this

I live at the start of the final approach path to one of the London airports, and used to live at an equivalent point for one of the others. I started to put together a site that combined ATC audio, ADS-B data and a live webcam - but then found it would be illegal to include the audio in the UK. :/

I watch a lot of VASAviation YT videos and listen to liveatc here and there. My parents travel every bi-weekly so when possible I always have LiveATC + Flightradar on and track their arrival and taxing. This is a great idea to fill in the "gaps" between comms. Thanks for sharing.

Similar to this, I like listening to the Apollo missions in real time[1], picking one active specific station at a time and listening just to that. FIDO is a good one!

[1]: https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/

Very pleasant to have this playing in the background. Is there a list of the playlist available somewhere?

broadcasts here https://www.liveatc.net/feedindex.php

but I guess you want the music, don't you? (me, too)

Also this

https://listentothe.cloud/

Has anyone found an airport from Brazil? I couldn't find any codes starting with SB.

Don't think this site is including them, but you can listen to Brazil ATC here:

https://www.liveatc.net/feedindex.php?type=international-sa

This is very cool. I do think it needs two volume controls so you can adjust. Music is too loud, I would like to hear the chatter more and LoFi just filling the gaps.

I wonder if something can be build on top of it if the mix is happening in the browser…

If you click "Settings" (on the right on desktop, not sure on mobile), it gives you two volume sliders, one for music and one for ATC.

I just wish the ATC audio were processed a bit more: maybe slow it down and put in some reverb?

Slowing down would be hard since it's a live stream

not recommended for pilots and controlling air traffic, but ffmpeg’s ‘atempo‘ filter works on audio streams:

‘ffmpeg -i ATC.wav -filter:a "atempo=0.5" -vn lofiatc.wav’

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#atempo

KiranRao0's point is that this will eventually fail:

curl -L http://d.liveatc.net/klax_twr | ffmpeg -i - -filter:a atempo=0.5 -f s24le - | ffplay -f s24le -ar 8k -ac 2 -

First, the pipe buffer between curl and ffmpeg will fill up (something like 64k) and then curl will be more and more delayed getting the next bit of audio from the server. Eventually the HTTP connection will fail. How and when that happens depends on exactly how the server is set up.

On my machine (Ubuntu) it stops after about 15 minutes.

You could increase the buffer size with pv or use a temporary file of course.

don't listen to KATL towers combined if you want to relax!

Recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35126914

I always had problems understanding what they say so quickly. Are there any voice recognition AIs that are trained on ATC voice data, with typical RF noise?

There are some projects, such as this one: https://github.com/idiap/w2v2-air-traffic

They transcribed 5000 hours of ATC speech data (available for licensing, not free).

How do air traffic controllers understand what’s being said with all the static?

Practice... getting used to. And in some cases better receivers than the one on someones private roof used to capture the transmissions for the stream.

As soon as I started listening I heard about AS1412 making an emergency landing

Something about radio comms is soothing to me and I love lofi! Thank you

Ah it seems it is down.

? it seems to be working for me

For me it played music for two seconds and then said “feed down”

music works but airport radio is down for me

"Everyone" uses IATA, why use ICAO codes?

Iata codes are just used with passengers, icao codes are used for everything else.

Add some midjourney-generated manga drawings.

Automated weather service would be cool too

https://www.weatherusa.net/radio

Weather radio repeat cycle is too short. It becomes noticeable and then irritating and distracting. I keep wanting to try shortwave news in a language I don't know but sounds nice. If it has too many english or Spanish cognates I'll probably get distracted trying to figure out what is said. Something tonal perhaps, Welsh or Chinese.

Maybe try the BBC shipping forecast?

https://youtu.be/CxHa5KaMBcM

I find the use of the Beaufort scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale) gives it a particularly dry flavor...

Tycho worked weather reports into some of his songs and it added a nice texture but that's a fair point that the repeat cycle is too short for streaming music like this.

Love this

That’s very nice :)

Came here to mention SomaFM and am glad to see many other comments about it.

Don't forget to support! https://somafm.com/

bernie sanders filibuster lofi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm6qy_9E0rY

love it! bookmarked

Hollywood has a way of turning anything into a production.

... what does this have to do with Hollywood?

Layering music over footage/audio(content) is a production. Not saying it's bad nor good. Just a fact.

It's a music production trick employed by untold numbers of musicians all over the world, more commonly known as "sampling".

It has nothing to do with Hollywood.

Its history goes way back - quite interesting and as you say, not Hollywood or even US in origin (according to the below).

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-first-song-to-use-sampling/...

I must have a neurological condition called synesthesia where audio appear like images.

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