The Sound of Wikipedia

This is one of my favorites. Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi at Hatnote built a site called Listen to Wikipedia. Built with D3, HowlerJS, and based on BitListen, this uses bots to find new edits to Wikipedia and assign those edits sounds, based on different parameters. For example, pitch of a note is based on the size of the edit. If it's a big edit, it's a deep note and if it's small, it's the highest key on the piano keyboard. Visually, green circles are from unregistered users, purple denotes bot edits, and there's a swell of strings when someone new makes their first edit. 

One of our instructors at General Assembly mentioned that we should avoid using sound in site design. For the most part, I agree with this. It can seem intrusive if a site starts making sounds at you, especially without your permission. I've been to a few restaurant websites that have started playing awful music at me and I shouted Shut Up, which generally does not indicate a good user experience. Still, cutting sound out entirely seems to remove a very large way in which we as humans express and receive information. 

Some musicians wouldn't consider the sounds made by this site to be "music." But I bet John Cage would be utterly enraptured. Click the image to look and listen.