Leico’s ray.sniff~ Max Device Converts Your Web Browsing Data to Audio
You’ve likely never pondered what your web activity might sound like…yes, sound like, if it were converted into sound. Thankfully, Max community member Leico, from Japan, has constructed ray.sniff~, a Max patch to answer the looming mystery of broadband exploration we never thought of asking ourselves: what does the internet sound like?
Inspired by Alva Noto’s unitxt album, in which tracks are “generated from converting pure data of programs, jpgs or other digital files into sound material,” Leico’s ray.sniff~ converts the pure data of a network into signal data, which is encoded as audio. Essentially as infinite as your deepest Wikipedia session, all of the sonified data transmitted from an internet joyride is noisy, glitchy, and unsettling. ray.sniff~ seems to serve as a larger metaphor about our erratic and addictive online habits.
Leico invites us “to [a] new relationship with the Web as [an] amazing sound source.” Be sure to open a new window.
