An artistic investigation into what happens inside a computer during one second of inactivity, published in Ruukku - Studies in Artistic Research nr. 15 (2021).

At the end of the work day, a software researcher colleague was tasked with closing all of their open programs, letting the computer wind down. Once the software activity of the day had stopped, our colleague ran a program that recorded the software activity of the kernel for one second. During this one second the human had no interaction with the computer.

As our digital microscope for software activity, we repurposed tools used to diagnose errors in the kernel to create a 47 hours 13 minutes and 30 seconds long sonification of 1 second of software (in)activity.

Read the entire article on Research Catalogue

Download the entire sonification here, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4153544

Credits

the sound of software tranquillity is an artistic research project by Erik Natanael Gustafsson and Benoit Baudry within the rethread.art software art collective.

Supported by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Wallenberg Autonomous Systems, Software and AI Program (WASP).