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Network-Monitoring Data Put to Music
StrongGlad writes "Building on the idea that people are naturally attuned to sound, the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning has created software that translates network and server activity into music. And, their IT department operators can interpret the music to detect problems in the system." Talk about finding the beauty in Spam. From the article: "Last Friday, IT department operators began listening to what sounds like classical music but is actually a precise audio model of system metrics. They are trained to recognize instruments, chords, tempo and other musical elements of music as a translation of e-mail activity from 15 servers over three subnets. Every aspect of the music correlates to information. Probes detect server activity and send about 20 summaries a second to the iSIC sound engine. The data is aggregated and transformed into an audio format."
You might be thinking of Peep http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/1 2/10/1529249&mode=nested
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/lisa2000/gilfix/gilfix_html/
Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound
Michael Gilfix & Prof. Alva Couch - Tufts University
Abstract
"Activities in complex networks are often both too important to ignore and too tedious to watch. We created a network monitoring system, Peep, that replaces visual monitoring with a sonic `ecology' of natural sounds, where each kind of sound represents a specific kind of network event. This system combines network state information from multiple data sources, by mixing audio signals into a single audio stream in real time. Using Peep, one can easily detect common network problems such as high load, excessive traffic, and email spam, by comparing sounds being played with those of a normally functioning network. This allows the system administrator to concentrate on more important things while monitoring the network via peripheral hearing."
"This work was supported in part by a USENIX student software project grant. "....
I figured you'd all want to hear what it sounds like:
Listen page
How come no one else here is reminded by the system made by the Gordon Way in the book by Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently's holistic Detective Agency"? There was an application he helped create called Anthem which turned financial results and various other pieces of company data into jingles and music.
That was my first though as well... to quote Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency:
"But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well. Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over it."
Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poised delicately on his fork in front of him, but did not interrupt.
"You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a sequence or pattern of numbers," enthused Richard. "Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length of notes, patterns of pitches and lengths. . "
"You mean tunes," said Reg. The carrot had not moved yet.
Richard grinned.
"Tunes would be a very good word for it. I must remember that."
"It would help you speak more easily." Reg returned the carrot to his plate, untasted. "And this software did well, then?" he asked.
"Not so much here. The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead March from Saul, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you'd probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end. Did spectacular business in the States, which was the main thing, commercially."
RIP DNA. The world makes less sense without you.
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.