Julian Oliver's website
To my surprise, I found the news to be even bleaker today than on previous days and so took the opportunity to render it out as noise, hearing it instead. The 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 students Florian Frenzel and Lizzy Onck developed upon this approach for their class project, tcpdump > /dev/dsp - a small black box that passively sniffs and sonifies WiFi traffic. You merely need to turn it on.
OSX: brew install sox sudo tcpdump -AI -i en0 | play -b 8 -e unsigned -t raw -r 48k - -I for monitor mode which lets me hear things from other people around me, too. i added the -A because i think otherwise you're only listening to the metadata, not the data itself. if you're in an area with lots of encrypted networks, it will sound noisier. a lot of the patterns you'll hear have to do more with how your network device is deciding what order to dump packets. with occasional bursts of "more interesting" sounds from unencrypted data. the other thing that's fun about this is if you only run it on yourself (remove -I and maybe lower sample rate to 8k), keep it in the background continuously, you can start to get a feeling for what kind of data your computer is sending across the network. overall this might work better on linux because tcpdump returns packets with less time quantization than on OSX.
