There is much room to continue this process of investigation further. A lot of the data from the trace is not being sonified and many other tranquillities can potentially be found in the data. The ftrace tool containes several other tracers that could be used to trace other aspects of software activity on a system, perhaps giving a different perspective.
Another avenue of exploration is that of sonifying many aspects of the system activity in real time. While this approach does not allow for the kind of stretching of the time scale as the work in this exposition largely relies on, it could allow a user to get to know their computer’s sonic identity and learn how it is impacted by user actions or inaction.
An interesting idea is brought up in A sense of self for unix processes (Forrest, 1996) where a software self as opposed to other (such as malware) is defined for a computer system by analysing patterns in its software activity, inspired by biological immune systems. Is there such a self in this software activity as well such that other systems sound noticeably different in character? Can a user form a meaningful connection with the way a certain kernel version sounds, or the way the graphics driver handles different applications?
If such a thing is possible, this could pave the way for a much deeper understanding of what software tranquillity could be, rooted in familiarity with the everyday software activity of your system. By listening to our software as we listen to the rest of the world around us we can learn to recognise the extraordinary from the ordinary.
This work is in no small part indebted to inspiration from the works of previous composers working with silence, slowness and/or the digital including John Cage, Morton Feldman, Éliane Radigue, Steve Roden, Pauline Oliveros, Richard Chartier, Ryoji Ikeda and Mika Vainio.
A big thank you to Long Zhang for donating a trace of his laptop, to Steve Ashby for inspiration and pointing us towards relevant resources and to the rest of the re|thread group, Nadia Campo Woytuk and Thomas Durieux, for their continuous inspiration and support.
This project was funded by CASTOR.
Forrest, S., Hofmeyr, S. A., Somayaji, A., & Longstaff, T. A. (1996, May). A sense of self for unix processes. In Proceedings 1996 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (pp. 120-128). IEEE.