
GitHub Audio - amberj
https://github.audio/
======
freditup
This is an interesting example where the new expanded set of TLDs can get
confusing. My brain interpreted the URL as something semantically like
"audio.github.com". Put another way, I thought the site was actually GitHub-
made at first glance at its domain.

Of course, this was possible in various ways before expanding TLDs, but I
think the problem, and thus the ease of phishing, is greater now.

~~~
eriknstr
I think the name "GitHub Audio" is confusing and probably a trademark
violation. When I read "GitHub Audio", I figured it was a new service by
GitHub for musicians to version control their music.

~~~
mojuba
That would be very very cool, but good luck with trying to version .logicx or
.cpr

I think popular software vendors should seriously reconsider their file
formats in the 21st century, including graphical and audio ones.

~~~
nerdponx
For all of the things you can point fingers at Microsoft for doing wrong,
opening up their second-generation document formats (docx, pptx, xlsx, etc)
was a wonderful, positive move.

It's a shame that the music industry hasn't had a similar revelation. I'm
tempted to be cynical and accuse them of fear and greed, but more likely "open
data" just isn't something they think about.

~~~
uep
I was under the impression their hand was forced. I vaguely recall various
nation governments insisting on open standards or they would no longer use
Office.

The OpenOffice formats were going through standardization and Microsoft
quickly bought their way through the standards process (this part I remember).
There was a _lot_ of complaining of how they exploited the particular
standards' body. They bought seats, that then sat vacant after they got their
standard pushed through, and couldn't meet quorums on other standards being
voted on.

There were also many complaints about the Microsoft standards themselves.
Particularly, that you couldn't implement support for the documents based
solely on their standard.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

~~~
halomru
Yeah, pretty much everyone agreed that the ISO standard for docx was nearly
impossible to completely implement for anyone outside of Microsoft and that it
should have never been accepted as a standard.

------
stevewilhelm
ICANN Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy

...

b. Evidence of Registration and Use in Bad Faith. For the purposes of
Paragraph 4(a)(iii), the following circumstances, in particular but without
limitation, if found by the Panel to be present, shall be evidence of the
registration and use of a domain name in bad faith:

(i) circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the
domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise
transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner
of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for
valuable consideration in excess of your documented out-of-pocket costs
directly related to the domain name; or

(ii) you have registered the domain name in order to prevent the owner of the
trademark or service mark from reflecting the mark in a corresponding domain
name, provided that you have engaged in a pattern of such conduct; or

(iii) you have registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of
disrupting the business of a competitor; or

(iv) by using the domain name, you have intentionally attempted to attract,
for commercial gain, Internet users to your web site or other on-line
location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant's mark as
to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of your web site or
location or of a product or service on your web site or location.

From
[https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-02-25-en](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/policy-2012-02-25-en)

~~~
Kiro
So what's your conclusion?

~~~
xigency
Maybe they concluded that this is fair to use and that's why they didn't have
any argument beyond posting the ICANN rules for us.

------
noelwelsh
Anyone who, like me, is interesting in digging under the surface, sound code
is here:
[https://github.audio/static/public/js/main.js](https://github.audio/static/public/js/main.js)

From there you can get the URLs for the audio files used. Uses Howler for
audio, web sockets to talk to the server, SVG to render the animations.

The above is all easy enough to get from the source, but it might save someone
else some time.

------
calinet6
I've done sonification of data before, and it's not easy at all. This one is
really well done -- it's really difficult to get the tonality and rhythm to be
pleasant as well as accurately represent the data. Nice work whoever built
this!

~~~
ahabman
sonification of data sounds wonderful. any examples?

~~~
markcerqueira
I replied above with another example of sonification of a StarCraft 2 game in
real-time. There's a link to a video of a performance there and here [1] is
the paper we wrote for the NIME conference.

[1]: www.nime.org/proceedings/2013/nime2013_146.pdf

------
dacort
Reminds me of the (sadly) now defunct choir.io. Intro post >
[https://corte.si/posts/choir/intro/choir.html](https://corte.si/posts/choir/intro/choir.html)

They had a demo of Github realtime activity and I hooked it into a bunch of
different events around the org - Salesforce/Yammer/Github/JIRA - was neat to
have a "pulse" of daily activity in the background.

------
nerdponx
Not what I was expecting. Very soothing to have running in the background

~~~
joshaidan
What I find soothing about it is when there are long pauses. It makes me
wonder... what's making people take long breaks?

~~~
nicky0
Well people aren't taking breaks, it's just a natural random variation. It's
the sound of a Poisson distribution.

------
codez
Thought I'd seen something very similar before:

[http://listen.hatnote.com/](http://listen.hatnote.com/)

~~~
andreygrehov
It clearly says in the footer

    
    
        inspired by hatnote

------
kbody
And here is Bitcoin audio [http://www.bitlisten.com](http://www.bitlisten.com)
Instead of commits etc., you have transactions.

~~~
andirk
So awesome. I just wrote a note down two days ago to make this. Beat me to it.

------
mkaziz
For some reason, this is the fifth posting of this site in the past two days,
and the only one to make it to the front page.

~~~
fiatjaf
It seems that HN is encouraging people to post the same Show HN projects
multiple times until they get traction. I have been restraining myself from
doing that with my own projects because I care a little about this community,
but since moderators and the majority of users don't, I will not restrain
myself anymore.

~~~
dang
It's great that you care about the community. People caring about HN is what
makes it good.

The repost thing is in the FAQ:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
It's a well-known weakness of HN's structure that many good stories get posted
to /newest and then fail to get noticed before they get washed out to see.
There are just so many submissions here.

Over the last couple of years we've developed techniques for rescuing good
stories and giving them second chances at attention. The simplest was just to
let people know that a small number of reposts is ok. Reposts aren't great, of
course, but missing good stories is worse. Think of it as allowing multiple
pitches before striking out.

Another thing we did is build a system for story reviewing—initially by
moderators only, now by us plus some users, with the plan of opening it to the
whole community as soon as we figure out how—under which stories that get
picked as good by reviewers get a random placement somewhere on the bottom
half of the front page. These are stories that would otherwise have fallen
through the cracks completely.

For example, your Show HN at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635722](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12635722)
looks good, so I just put it in the second-chance queue, and it's on the front
page now. You should also have gotten an email saying we did this. Btw you
might want to add a comment to that thread introducing yourself and explaining
the background to the project—readers like that, and it tends to seed better
discussions.

~~~
fiatjaf
I know it is in the fact, I just thought this one was posted more times than
it actually was (if it was actually only posted 3 times, one flagged).

Thank you for all the clarifications anyway. I actually complained knowing
that achieving the correct mix of fairness, having-good-stories, and
overposting prevention is a kind of impossible task (and HN seems to be doing
well), so I was a kind of a troll, we may say. I'm sorry.

------
sudmishra
[https://twitter.com/debugger22/status/783301929220780032](https://twitter.com/debugger22/status/783301929220780032)

------
hacker42
How much percent of the entire activity on GitHub is that?

~~~
benmanns
I was curious about this also. It tracks the global public events endpoint

[https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/#list-
public...](https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/#list-public-
events)

which has a limit of 30 items, requesting every 2 seconds

[https://github.com/debugger22/github-
audio/blob/e1170daa3a64...](https://github.com/debugger22/github-
audio/blob/e1170daa3a6478163b7645266ec903ee254008ed/server/index.js#L96)

And then limits to 3 pushes, 5 issue comments, and 3 issue events:

[https://github.com/debugger22/github-
audio/blob/e1170daa3a64...](https://github.com/debugger22/github-
audio/blob/e1170daa3a6478163b7645266ec903ee254008ed/server/index.js#L108)

There are definitely situations where you'd be losing events, though I don't
know what percentage that represents.

------
akshatpradhan
Sounds like it was inspired by Listen to Wikipedia.

[http://listen.hatnote.com/](http://listen.hatnote.com/)

------
devilsavocado
The name Github Audio reminds me of something I've been searching for: Version
control for Musicians. A lot of music is now made over the internet. When I'm
working on a track with a remote bandmate my workflow consists of recording,
exporting the track, uploading it to dropbox, and then he needs to download,
and import the track into his DAW. Surely there must be a better way. Is there
a way for musicians to work together on songs the same way programmers can
write software together?

I actually worked on building this before but nothing came of it. The main
problem was a 'diff' for audio files.

~~~
oshoham
[https://splice.com/](https://splice.com/)

------
nichodges
Very nicely standing on the shoulders of Brian Eno's Generative Music ideas,
his Bloom app in particular[1].

[1] [http://www.generativemusic.com/](http://www.generativemusic.com/)

~~~
goodmachine
Much as I like Eno (this project is more Eno-lite than Eno-like imho) the
story of generative music goes back some way before his time. To explore,
start here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel)

------
jwn
This would actually be pretty rad if I could narrow down the events to include
only those from Github organizations that I care about.

~~~
benmanns
The code is open source, so you (or any reader) could do that.

Either replace

[https://github.com/debugger22/github-
audio/blob/e1170daa3a64...](https://github.com/debugger22/github-
audio/blob/e1170daa3a6478163b7645266ec903ee254008ed/server/index.js#L70)

with

[https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/#list-
events...](https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/events/#list-events-for-
an-organization)

Or, do some filtering on

[https://github.com/debugger22/github-
audio/blob/e1170daa3a64...](https://github.com/debugger22/github-
audio/blob/e1170daa3a6478163b7645266ec903ee254008ed/server/index.js#L106)

------
afandian
Something similar from a project I'm working on. Just a silly debugger tool
but turned into a way to show how how lots of components in a system are
interacting:

[http://status.eventdata.crossref.org/thing-action-
service/in...](http://status.eventdata.crossref.org/thing-action-
service/index.html)

(if you want to know what this is about, the service is under development, you
can read about it here
[http://eventdata.crossref.org/guide/](http://eventdata.crossref.org/guide/) )

------
smnplk
...bing, bong, chim, pluck..and my Chrome is frozen.

------
comboy
Very nice. Although open source music where you have MIT licensed songs in
editable format would also be an interesting experiment.

------
ryancox
A coincidentally timed writeup on 'Sonification for monitoring and debugging
distributed systems':

[https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/09/sonification-
for-m...](https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/09/sonification-for-
monitoring-and.html)

------
nyreed
If github actually did provide a hosting/version control service for
musicians, it might gain users from the musicians who are worried by
soundcloud and co's pivots to monetisation.

------
winter_blue
Wow, this sounds really beautiful. They've done a great job and taking random
signals and stringing them into beautiful and pleasant-to-hear music!

------
nalllar
Something went wrong:
[https://i.imgur.com/tACBiiK.png](https://i.imgur.com/tACBiiK.png)

~~~
darfs
[https://twitter.com/debugger22/status/783301929220780032](https://twitter.com/debugger22/status/783301929220780032)

Some folks killed the comment of the author with that Link.

------
wkoszek
If I was a manager and a music geek as I am now, I'd totally request
integration of this thing with my repository, JIRA and Confluence :-)

------
emeraldd
Am I the only one who immediately has to hunt down and close a tab the moment
I hear auto-play audio of any kind?

------
Dowwie
Ambient github!

------
poorman
It’s crazy that there’s 3k+ people currently listening to events from github’s
system. So much #nerd

~~~
paulintrognon
The link is on top of HN, that's why :)

------
sjclemmy
This is a great idea. I love it. Well done!

------
tofflos
Not what I was epecting. Awesome. :)

------
caiohdf
That's actually very relaxing

------
geuis
Not working in mobile safari

------
Yhippa
This is what I don't understand about Android. I have sounds set to "Alarms
only" yet this webpage still plays it's tones.

~~~
Waterluvian
Same. I'm at work on the toilet. Someone just called over if I needed
assistance.

~~~
_ao789
Would love to know how that played out

~~~
Waterluvian
I said it was some GitHub experiment.

He said "...with photos?"

"No.. some sound thing."

------
andrewvijay
Unplugged the head phone in the office today. A colleague asked "what kind of
dumbass music is that?" "Sound of creation" I replied. He was intrigued and
was blown away by the concept.

------
xxdesmus
502 :(

------
timehastoldme
Well, there's a new world's worst thing.

~~~
sctb
If this is all you have to say about something on Hacker News, we kindly ask
that you avoid saying anything at all.

~~~
timehastoldme
It's shorthand for "I have a distaste for this thing which I presume to be
understood if not necessarily shared." I was wrong about that.

This isn't musical at all! It's some lazy shit a high-schooler with free time
and a vague understanding of the Web Audio API could do. Moreover, there's no
value in it. The abstract "sonificiation of real data" is such a low bar,
there's so much room for creativity, and there are so many brilliant artists
who (rightfully) don't want to wade in the depths of the hacky web-tech
garbage necessary to make something like this work that it's a wonder anyone
gives a fuck about this. To find any value in this, one would have to have
tuned out somewhere between having an abstract understanding of the project
and actually listening to the darn thing.

Now, do you really want to discuss the merit of the thing, or would you rather
Get Offended on the Internet?

~~~
sctb
Sorry if I wasn't clear, but my comment was strictly procedural and divorced
from the topic. We ask that community members post civilly and substantively
on Hacker News or not at all, because we're here to learn and to gratify our
intellectual curiosity. Any substantive discussion of the merit of the
original post would include information, which your comment lacked.

