Has anyone ever tried listening to their infrastructure instead of watching it?
Odd question from someone outside the field. I'm a sound designer and I've been reading about sonification (turning data into sound). NASA does it with telescope data, and there are old experiments where people played network traffic as ambient audio.
It made me wonder about on-call and monitoring. You can't stare at your monitor all day, and you shouldn't have to. The idea would be to free your eyes: an ambient track in the background that stays calm when everything's healthy and slowly shifts when latency creeps up or error rates rise, before anything actually pages. You could focus on your actual work, or step away from the screen, and your ears would tell you when something's drifting.
Has anyone tried something like this? Would it be useful, or would you mute it within 5 minutes? Genuinely curious what would make it worth keeping on vs. instantly annoying, and in which situations you'd actually want it (deep work, deploys, night shift, incidents…)