Show HN: Onhold – Play sounds while and after shell jobs complete

Here's what I'd love to have: an ambience. Turning metrics like CPU, memory, IO and network loads into subtle sounds. Some more important background jobs execution into more distinct, but still somewhat subtle sound.

Basically, like the bridge of Enterprise D[0] (or its main engineering[1]).

The reasoning here is to recreate the experience of "feeling" the machine. Like drivers do with their cars. Like we could do in the past with HDD sounds, and now sometimes with fan noise[2].

Last time I mentioned it publicly, someone told me they use widgets with resource usage graphs for that purpose. I've started using them too, but I noticed that I generally don't look at them. Even semi-transparent, they're mostly just a blob of color that occasionally obstructs some UI I need to interact with. But sound is a separate channel, and easier to process subconsciously.

Anyone knows of tooling relevant to implement this idea?

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[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XajaCX88NnU

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwLsBldD9kQ

[2] - During a recent debugging session, I accidentally gained some insight about the problem by noticing the fan is making less noise than it should during certain tests.

On MacOS instead of tput bel I use: `say "finished"` (or something)

For non-Mac users: `say` will activate a voice saying some text

Here's what I did to make sound come after a command:

  import os
  from random import seed
  from random import random
  seed(a=None)
  def rnd():
          return 200 + (random() * (2100 - 200))
  duration = 0.5
  freq = rnd()
  os.system('play -nq -t alsa synth {} sine {}'.format(duration, freq))

The only requirements are python and sox[0].

Used like this:

  mycommand && python3 sound.py

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[0] - https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/sox/play.1.en.html