linuxaudio.org

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On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 06:26:11PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

quoted text
> On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 12:19 -1000, david wrote:

> > Paul Davis wrote:

> > > On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 11:57 -1000, david wrote:

> > >

> > >>> Well, there is a Linux program that will read the entire contents of a

> > >>> hard drive as though it were one big audio file.  So I guess we have

> > >>> no more need for musicians, because that would be a collection of sine

> > >>> waves of various frequencies, and that's all it takes.

> > >> What's the name of that program? I want to listen to my /home folder! ;-)

> > >

> > > cat(1)

> >

> > Cat to what?

>

> cat /dev/hda1 > /dev/dsp^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H/dev/snd/pcmC0D0p

>

> to listen to ~:

>

> 	find ~ | xargs cat > /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p

> 

Now, if I wanted to be a truly modern musician/artist, I'd hack up a bash script something like:
	dd if=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1M | lame --cbr 128 - mydisk.mp3
and then the script would use curl some such thing to upload it to webserver somewhere, which would then build a webpage with links and podcasts and m3u's so that noise enthusiasts can listen to the sound of random people's hard disks. Then I could post the script somewhere, have a bunch of people download it and run it, to populate the server with noise.
And that then would be a work of modern art. It might even get Slashdotted and have its 15 minutes of fame.
And no, I'm not going waste time coding up such a thing, because there's no need to, just like there's no need to actually listen to what it would produce. Like a lot of modern music and modern art, especially the example given in this thread of 4'33", the idea itself is sufficient, and IMHO the idea is the actual work of art. The actual realization of the idea is just one means of conveying it, and sometimes not even necessary.
- -ken

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