One thing I’m really into is sound. A long time ago, I taught sound design and synthesis at a design college and loved being able to surround myself with everything audio. I still like to explore this area of creativity, but sometimes that can be tough to do. Especially when you are spending your days working in a very analytical mode. So, for this project, I figured “Why not combine the two?” I decided to make something to mash the two hemispheres of my brain together.

After some brainstorming and looking around my office to see what things I was currently working on that might fit, I came upon the idea of listening to the ‘music’ of a data bus. I had just finished designing a modular, CAN-based system and was fairly deeply immersed in the details of the internal communication bus. While watching data packets stream past my eyes for a few hours, I got the idea of listening in on them instead of watching them.

The idea was simple. Create an interface to the bus I just created, listen in on packets as they passed by, and trigger sounds based on the distinguishing features of these packets. I used a Microchip MCU for the brains and an MCP2551 as the CAN transceiver. The unit would listen for CAN packets, parse them, retrieve a certain value within the packet, and then turn around and output MIDI data over the serial output of the microcontroller.

The end result was a fairly periodic recording where one can hear the late arrival of some packets from time to time. Enjoy!