Aleatoric Browsing
Listening to the internet
Around a year ago, I wrote a small piece of code to do one simple thing: listen to HTTP requests.
When they start, stop, or fail.
The sound you hear depends on the request type. A request begins — a high-pitched telephone-call rings. The request ends, the telephone call is answered, and a pitched tone sounds. Could be one of a few samples. An image is an old drum machine pop. A stylesheet, a cello pluck. A script, a guitar string picked. A single note on piano means an Ajax request completed.
The note’s pitch depends on content size. When a large file downloads, you’ll hear a very low pitch. And vice-versa.
Whether or not something is served from a cache matters as well. If it’s fresh, the tone gets some spring reverb, like something dropped in a bucket. If the file was cached, the sound is piped through a telephone effect; a much less attention-getting sound then.
And finally, when a request fails: the instantly-recognizable Sosumi.
The result is a bizarre music. Kind of John Cage-y, which is to say it sounds a little like a cat walking on a keyboard.
I’m actually listening to some of the code’s aleatoric music right now, as I write. I can hear Medium intermittently saving my work. A high-pitched tone sounds every time “Saving…” turns into “Saved”.
None of this should be too surprising. Modern websites with lots of images consume lots of bandwidth. Open up the New York Times, it’s an orchestra hit. Wikipedia — not much noise at all. The world wide web’s first page is the quietest of them all.
The best music is the sound of a website idling.
Plug your laptop into a nice pair of speakers, open twitter.com, then get up to make a sandwich. Twitter pops in the background — it’s the sound of timers firing, data syncing, the website doing its own thing.
If you’d like to hear the music for yourself, the Chrome extension is called Aleatoric. For the less adventurous, or those not using Chrome, I made a YouTube video:
