Hark! I Hear a Dropped Packet!

aarondsouza writes "The New Scientist has an article about Chris Chafe, a cellist and director of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University in California, who has the idea that one can use sound as an audible measure of the health of an internet connection. By sending a bunch of sound pulses across the line and measuring echo time, an average ping time of 10ms would be heard as a 100Hz tone. The idea is that the human ear is much more sensitive to variations in pitch, and thus "listening" to the connection would be a better indicator of its health. The article is short on technical specs but the project page (SoundWIRE) has more."