GitHub realtime activity as soundscape | Hacker News Reader

GitHub realtime activity as soundscape

choir.io

102 pointsjsvine35 comments

Gulp - not sure we were ready for HN yet! At any rate, here's a blog post about what we're trying to accomplish with Choir:

http://corte.si/posts/choir/intro/choir.html

It's very, very early days yet, and we're sending out the first few invites today. If this intrigues you, and you'd like to pipe your own data to Choir, put your address down at http://choir.io.

This reminds me of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (by Douglas Adams) where one of the main characters created ad jingles and sounds for businesses based on their quarterly earnings and similar data. Well done!

This is the coolest idea I have seen in a long time. I really really really wish you the best success!

I signed up for the beta, and can't wait to try and use it to hook into alerts. I look forward to calibrating ambient frequencies that correspond to things like message rates or queue sizes. Imagine if you had a teapot boiling sound if a queue backs up. Of course you want to go tend to that! Brilliant.

I'm finding this very pleasant to listen to - going to use as coding background noise instead of white noise for a day and see how it pans out. There's something very satisfying about knowing the ambient noise is that of code being open sourced around the globe.

I'd love to use something like this as a background for getting work done, maybe with a different set of sounds. Definitely loving the key clicks and general "tech"-ness of the bloop theme, but the "intrusive" sounds when larger repos are touched kind of kills that use case.

Dream: Remove the "ignore small repos", change the sounds to be something a bit more neutral (foghorns are right out :P), and use volume instead of SFX for larger repos. Instant perfect programmer ambiance.

All of this will be possible soon. We're working on the ability for users to completely customize the sound palette.

You might enjoy a stochastic noise machine I made:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/applpi

It sounds like airplane engines from within a 747 - at the volume you set, of course. Much better than jlooch or turing tunes.

I'm a bit disappointed that you erased the github history when moving to sourcefourge, as it would be interesting to compare it to the version you showed six months ago.

I erased it, but I'm sure there's still a copy somewhere :)

It's identical code of the last github release, with minor readme changes. And if you're inclined to build it, it should be pretty easy to do from source.

The code is organized into packages pretty well, but I wrote it for fun, so there's not the best comments or unit testing.

Also, it's useful if nothing else for a 100% Java implementation of the 'Freeverb' project that's public domain and originally written in C++ (or maybe C?).

Enjoy the sound/noise/code, it's free!

I was looking for something like this. I created an automated build script that rebuilds the project when any dependency file is saved. I wanted to be able to play a sound when the build was complete so I know it's safe to reload the project. I'm also excited about being able to hear if someone has pushed to the project so I know to pull. Hopefully I can use this.

Reposting from the other thread, which seems to be a bit dead:

Watching the github realtime activity with sound was mesmerising. I spent at least fifteen minutes listening to it.

You mentioned there will be Windows and OSX standalone clients coming soon. Will there be an API for writing clients?

So, an API for the player aspect of Choir is not in the works at the moment. We've worked hard on the other end, though, making it as easy as possible to feed data into Choir and get sound out.

Nicely done, requested an invite. The github firehose is a bit crazy, though quite amusing for a few minutes.

I could see myself using this for much lower frequency events, like customer conversion or sizeof(shopping_cart).

What you describe is one of our core use cases. The Github stream is indeed a bit crazy, as you say, because we wanted someone who dipped into it for a minute or two to hear sounds from the full spectrum. Our real-world feeds are much more subdued.

I agree this could be very cool for low frequency events like @mik3y suggested.

I know it's just a demo, but it would be nice to have a visual indication of which events made which sound.

Maybe at some point down the line, your api could expose an image as well (like maybe image/g/3 is the "g/3" waveform in green, while image/b/5 is the "b/5" waveform in red).

Anyways, good work!

Yes, making that link clearer is one of the things we're thinking hardest about right now. The (inadequate) measure at the moment is the replay-on-hover when you scrub over the feed messages. I'm not sure how instantly recognizable a waveform might be, but something that indicates pitch and duration could work. Basically, this is the kind of thing we're playing with right now, and why we want a few brave users to join us very, very early on. If you've submitted an invite request, let me know which address you used, and I'll make sure you're in the first cohort of users.

Here's some css that helps a little bit IMO (for newer browsers).

It might be even better to scale the green/yellow/red values based on their 0-3 values.

Anyways:

    tr[data-sound] {
    	border-right: 5px solid;
    }
    tr[data-sound^="g"] {
	    border-right-color: green;
    }
    tr[data-sound^="n"] {
	    border-right-color: yellow;
    }
    tr[data-sound^="b"] {
	    border-right-color: red;
    }

I just signed up. Sent you my info via a different channel.

I love how you've solved the "constant scrolling preventing me from clicking that damn link that keeps flying by" problem. Really well done.

It looks like the github firehose is about 2 hours out of date? At least I'm getting links to commits that are several hours ago.

The feed is realtime. We only see commits when the user pushes, or when a merge is done, etc.

This concept is amazing. Are you planning user created soundpacks? I'd love to make few.

This is very, very high on our priority list. We realise that this is a subjective thing, and that we're not nearly talented enough to explore all the possibilities. Creating, editing and sharing sound packs is on the way.

I'm giddy right now. This is what's been missing for this level of activity feed.

Would be awesome if you could slice public tracks on SoundCloud to create source files.

Are you opening the source for this up or have business plans for it or both?

We're still thinking about which components will be opened, but we're primarily thinking of this as a service. Our pricing model will probably be based on number of concurrent listeners.

Very cool. I'm a big fan of your other work. Good luck with this!

Very cool. Have you looked at doing this with stock market data?

Not yet. We will definitely be putting together more realtime demo feeds, and stock market data is an option. Any links to realtime feeds of data you'd like to hear?

Twitter firehose ? with hashtag filter!

I'd love to combine this with sentiment processing to play happier sounds, sad sounds, etc. Brilliant world of possibility. Love the product!

Sentiment analysis is an amazing idea. Monitoring what people say about specific brand/product while doing something else provides incredible value.

I don't hear a thing on iOS :(

Wow, this is incredibly cool!

This is amazing!

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