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January 22, 2005
The digital anthem






A couple of sleep-deprived geeks figured out a neat hack: They used a simple Linux command to get their computers to "listen" to various bits of data the computer was generating -- from random numbers to the hard-drive activity -- and outputted it as audio files. It's pretty wild-sounding stuff, much like the parrot-like squawk of an old-skool modem. Then they ran a few highly-structured bitmap images through, such as the American flag above. The results are oddly musically tenable: The digital anthem.


(Thanks to Jason Uechi for this one!)

Posted by Clive Thompson at January 22, 2005 03:45 PM

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Comments

Actually, folks have been catting weird things to /dev/audio since pretty much as long as there's been a /dev/audio to cat to. See http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=660722 for an explanation.

Posted by: crux at January 22, 2005 4:16 PM

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