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Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#161

Post by grahamj »

solardev wrote: post #80
grahamj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly agree but this does give me an idea: having a sound that indicates a change you just made to a line caused an issue with an offsceeen line. For example deleting the last usage of a variable declared higher up. Of course there are already onscreen solutions for that, such as indicators in the minimap, but it could be more obvious as a sound.

I agree, that would be nice. It could be like RTS games, where a narrator says something like "Your code is under attack" and there's a ping on the minimap pointing at the exact line.

lol coding does feel like an RTS sometimes.

Oh shit something broke over there!

Crap I forgot to built something over here!

Bah I knew I should have tested that!

The deadline is approaching!

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#162

Post by madcaptenor »

left-struck wrote: post #150
ghostpepper wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I read that Finnish was a major seventh I was hoping that English would be a minor seventh or something even more subtly different. A minor 7th vs a minor 7 flat 5 etc. Would be funny to create an elaborate system of notification tones that are only discernible by a trained musician

> Would be funny to create an elaborate system of notification tones that are only discernible by a trained musician Oh man, could this concept be turned into an esoteric programming language where to program you use a musical keyboard and all the symbols in your lang are different chords or intervals Absolutely no visual feedback for extra pain

This reminds me of the conlang "solresol" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol)

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#163

Post by netsharc »

mattlondon wrote: post #120

Something I have often thought about for years but never implemented was "sound logging" where you get specific points of your code to play audio clips or tones instead of/as well as logging to console etc. The idea being that you can test the app.and hear the sound logs going off as you go. In a tight loop that executes quickly I would hope that you could hear something "being off" in the same way that a mechanic ca…

Makes me think of movie/TV computers that beep and bop, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsP-kWvl1ds

An out of place beep would probably be noticable.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#164

Post by SoftTalker »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #90

Absolutely fucking not. My computer should make no sound that I don't explicitly ask it to make.

Yes. My computer can't even make a sound even if it wants to (no speakers connected). My phone has the same settings -- all sounds off, the exception is for turn-by-turn nav if I'm in a dense area, otherwise I just follow the blue line.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#165

Post by netsharc »

cdchn wrote: post #123
pavel_lishin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> gas pump Most of them play advertisements while you fuel up. I hate it. The only thing that I like about New Jersey forbidding me from touching a gas pump is that I'm not subjected to ads for diarrhea medication or low-APR loans every time I fuel up.

Great ready for the newest innovation, putting a small cellphone sized screen on the nozzle that you put into your vehicle. https://www.dekra.nl/en/smarter-nozzle/

"This litre/ounce of petrol brought to you by LinkedIn. Synergize your career trajectory today!".

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#166

Post by dennis-tra »

mattlondon wrote: post #120

Something I have often thought about for years but never implemented was "sound logging" where you get specific points of your code to play audio clips or tones instead of/as well as logging to console etc. The idea being that you can test the app.and hear the sound logs going off as you go. In a tight loop that executes quickly I would hope that you could hear something "being off" in the same way that a mechanic ca…

I had the exact same thought for years but never came around experimenting with it. I also hoped that one could eventually hear that something is off.

I think this can happen by either recognising the "rhythm" in which sounds appear and/or recognising different tones.

As a first step, my idea was to write a logger that plays different beep sounds for different log levels. That way you could mostly identify the “rhythm” because I guess most log messages would have the same severity. However, to a tiny degree also by the pitch of the sound.

Then as a second step I thought of mapping the log message to a scale of sounds by e.g., hashing the message. This obviously would only work if there’s no dynamic content in the message.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#167

Post by tacon »

In the depths of the pandemic, James Shore ran a Tuesday TDD Lunch & Learn livestream. He based everything around TDD with an audio addition to the red/green display. Here is an example of the sound:

https://youtu.be/nlGSDUuK7C4?list=PLD-LK0HSm0Hpp-OspFpZ32uY7...

I really like the gentle audio feedback with TDD, so I took the sounds from James' bespoke TDD harness and added it to my jest-audio-reporter.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#169

Post by busterarm »

Almost 20 years ago, Ang Cui and I were bullshitting and brainstorming around an idea he had to categorize patterns in network traffic as audio tones so that one could listen to network traffic flow.

He has since gone on to do other, bigger things and I'm still sitting here kicking myself for not at least pursuing the idea a little.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

#170

Post by JonChesterfield »

I'm moderately interested in audio feedback indicating performance behaviour. Maybe memory allocation or syscalls. Page faults. Something to play during unit tests or similar and give some indication of things going wrong. Not interested enough to implement it yet.
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