Radioscope: A device that turns Wi-Fi activity into sound

I built something slightly unusual over Christmas

Radioscope, a device that turns Wi-Fi activity into sound.

It started as an exploration into sonifying data and finding ways to perceive invisible systems without looking at a screen. With a Raspberry Pi and headphones, you can “hear” your wireless environment in real time. Access points, clients, handshakes, data transfers all become texture and rhythm.

It’s not a surveillance tool and it doesn’t capture payloads, it just listens to signal activity patterns and maps them to audio.

One thing that interested me was the ability to passively recognise different behaviours and wifi environments by ear. For example, bursts of management frames (like deauth storms) have a very distinct “signature”. Not sure if the use case here is art, accessibility, security research or just curiosity but exploring the boundary between networks and perception is interesting.

Mostly, it was an excuse to play with Rust and Dioxus, pcap parsing, and audio design and to see what happens when you treat networks like music. I find it quite relaxing as background noise.