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."

Comments

Very cool.

[Raven42rac]

It sounds kind of hokey, but it probably works very well, certainly better than looking at a bunch of hex. This probably depends on what you're using to monitor your traffic. After all, the best morse code transcribers do 250 wpm.

An aid, not a replacement

[CharonX]

I think you misunderstood the purpose of this project.
They don't want to replace all those graphic displays with music, but they intend to use sound in addition to graphics.
If you rely purely on a graphics display you would have to hire someone who has to babysit the monitor, in case something odd starts to happen. He can't really work if he has to stop every 5 minutes and check the monitor (and there are probably "false feeling of safty" effects to be countered too, after all, checking the monitor for X weeks and nothing big popping up might make the person(s) realax too much)
With the music you don't have to check at the monitor all the time, you notice when the music changes (and can go check) but as long as it remains the same you can get some real work done.

Re:OK, OK, it's fun...

[bfree]

Real-time graphics require you to sit there watching them constantly. If this audio was not too distracting (and I suspect no matter what you would learn to tune out the normal operational sounds) you could actually hae people working on something while monitoring the network, rather then simply employing people to act like a desk security guard wathing the screens. Of course is anything sounds funny it time to have a look. I wonder if they have done any work with time-compression on this audio generation technique, so people could produce a X minute audio clip every Y minutes, could be handy to listen to a 5 minute track every day to get a quick outline of how a day went.