Sound of Data

Ever wonder what all the data in your hard drive sounds like? Or simply want to kill the silence in your server room? Simple, just direct devices into the audio device and listen to the sweet beautiful sound of your data (or other device). Reminds me of the good old days of 56k dialup. The more cluttered the data in your drive is, the more interesting the sound is. As root issue the following commands.

cat /dev/hda > /dev/audio
cat /dev/hdb2 > /dev/audio
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/audio

First line outputs raw data from your 1st hard drive (hda) to the audio device, second line outputs the data in your second partition in second drive directly into the audio device, and third just outputs random data into the audio which is simply just noise. Try connecting devices like the mouse or what ever else to your audio device or other devices, you just might get some interesting results. Hopefully I will get a hold of a old printer, want to output my hard drive directly into the parallel port and see what the printer does (or doesn’t do).

Do this with caution. Don’t be stupid and output the /dev/random into your hard drive or similar (not sure if this is possible but you get the idea). If you do something like this and lose all your life’s work, remember that you were warned.

Update

For one reason or another your audio device may not be /dev/audio or /dev/dsp so change that accordingly.