by the way oschatz, maybe you can tell me something about a totally diferent think:
i’ve been dreaming for ages to be able to collect audible noises from the huge data transfers ocurring inside a computer.
i’ve asked many good programmers about this and (apart of looking me like a mad guy) they all told me that this could maybe achieved by building a special driver that could listen to the hardware guts.
maybe this sourceBuffer could be used for that?
my idea is to listen to the raw data going for instance thru an usb port, the vga, the hardisk etc…
of course, as data transfer to much much higher freqs than the audible ones, only some of those “signals” could be used. but then also recording them and draging down 200 octaves…
harrharrharr…my daughter have old fashioned cd player.
once, she took a data cd rom and listen to brrrrzzziiiiiiiiffffrrrrrccccciiiiiii-spectrum-alike sounds.
there is also one other solution: replace the ground of your soundcard, then you will become livestream of the inside happening…
cheers.
in concerts i’ve used guitar pickups to get noises from inside the computer, mainly the hardisk’s electronmagnetic movements. i did also once connected the vga output cables to separate channels of a mixing desk but only the sync burst was audible and not very interesting, of course other signals where far too high frecuency.
what i mean is to consider the dataflow circulating in some concrete points of a computer as raw digital signals instead of meaningfull information, and convert them into analog audio signals. (preferably in real time but also by recording the data)
that would indeed be pure computer music…
and another think, with 3ghz data speeds, few seconds of data recorded and pitched down some 200 octaves would give enough material to release an entire discography !!!
with modern RAM sizes like 2GB i hope you would release your cd discography in a 2000000000-channel audio configuration.
using guitar pickups will catch up all kind of magnetic fields in a computer. a loose cable from your sound card (perhaps secured by a capacitor in series) should be able to pick up many electrical fields, which might turn out more interesting.
with really old microcomputers an AM shortwave radio tuned to the frequency of the cpu was usable to pick up signals from the inner working. the demodulation in the radio will directly output audible frequencies (note that a FM radio will most probably not lead to interesting sounds, as there are most probably no frequency modulated signals inside). there still might be some buses (hard disc etc.) running on lower frequencies these days. or you may go for extremely underclocking your pc.
2000000000 channels… lovelly !
that would be some surround !
AM radios are great too of course, i use to process feedback using radio transmiters, receivers and physical resonators but never thought about tuning at the pc’s frequency…
all those lovelly analog stuff and other weird tricks to pervert technology are great fun indeed.
but now in a pure software way, do you think it would be possible to collect (and maybe process) data in realtime from weird places inside the pc to send them to an audio driver ?
for example, can data going from the processor to the ram memory be somehow monitored?
with some c# wizardery someone could write a c# plugin for gettiing the data from the Windows Performance Monitoring subsystem.
The cooler way would be a DLL Injection vvvv plugin which would patch your running system and outputs various statistics about who calls which dlls.
Or - another old idea - wrap up an emulator for something like a Commodore 64 into a c# plugin, and make the emulated main memory available as a spread. (Or have a Poke input pin to control the emulated SID)
