Introduction

To my surprise, I found the news to be even bleaker today than in previous days and so out of self-preservation chose not to read further. Instead I took the opportunity to render it out as noise, hearing it instead.

The basic technique is very simple, capture traffic on a network interface with the popular packet capture tool tcpdump and throw it straight to the sound card, which on Linux systems is represented by a file.

It’s a simple and brutalist technique well known to GNU/Linux networky people, one I often show students in workshops. In mid 2014 I taught a Critical Computing workshop at Weissensee Art Academy, Berlin, whereby one of the students Florian Frenzel developed upon this approach for his class project, tcpdump > /dev/dsp is a small black box that passively sniffs WiFi traffic, sonifying what it finds. You merely need to turn it on.

Technique used

The basic command for sonifying

    $ sudo tcpdump -s 0 -i wlan0 -w /dev/dsp

The ‘s -0’ part of the command refers to the snaplen, where ‘0’ means “capture everything you can” from each packet rather than snapping off at a length like 300 bytes (-s 300), etc. The ‘-i wlan0’ part refers to the typical name for a wireless/WiFi adaptor on Linux systems and ‘-w /dev/dsp’ means “write to the sound card located at /dev/dsp”.

Try it, visit a site and hark the noise. Try changing ‘-s 0’ to another value (like 100). It’ll alter the pitch.

You can also view the traffic like so in ASCII and Hex (‘AX’) with a high level of verbosity (vv):

    $ sudo tcpdump -i wlan0 -AXvv -s 0 -w /dev/dsp

ALSA’s ‘aplay’ can be used to manipulate the sample rate (which is what I did above) like so and write to both channels of the sound card (stereo):

    $ sudo tcpdump -s 0 -i wlan0 -w - | aplay -r 22500 -c 2

News as noise

Below are the sounds various news sites made as the data from their front page was interpreted by a sound card between 8pm CEST on the 12th of December, 2014.

Der Spiegel International

Germany’s Der Spiegel has a characteristic bleak and industrial palette today, appropriate for articles like ‘Students of Death’ and ‘Summit of Failure’.

CNN

The CNN is just dense.

BBC

The BBC’s home page gets off to a blistering start before losing itself in an excitable trot for what appears to be no good reason.

The New York Times

Today’s NYT sounds like it’s trying to tune in to itself, resulting in little whistles and clicks.

The Guardian (UK)

A veritable wreckage of fear and malaise, suitable of titles like ‘Plane was in near miss with drone’.

The Intercept

The anguish of today’s The Intercept is palpably tortured, so to speak.