pi-computer-noises

Retro mainframe ambience for pi: a 60Hz mainframe hum with data blips while the agent thinks (70s/80s sci-fi console — WOPR, Star Trek). Fades to silence when the last turn ends.

How it sounds / works

• All sound is synthesized in pure TypeScript. Blips are a near-uniform telemetry stream of short electronic beeps at tightly-clustered pitches. Sparse ambient server-room beeps (spread across octaves) play over the hum even between turns.
• Everything is mixed into ONE continuous PCM stream fed to a single long-lived raw player (pacat / pw-cat / ffplay / play) on a dedicated worker thread, so timing stays sample-accurate and never stutters when the host's event loop is busy.
• One shared instance per user: any number of pi agents elect a single audio owner (Unix socket + O_EXCL lock file) and refcount active turns — hum + blips play while ANY agent is working and stop when the LAST one finishes.

Install on pi

pi install git:github.com/enlavin/pi-computer-noises
# or local checkout:
pi install /path/to/pi-computer-noises

Enable/disable with pi config. Remove with pi remove /path/to/pi-computer-noises.

Requirements

• A raw-PCM player: pipewire (pw-cat), pulseaudio-utils (pacat), ffmpeg (ffplay), or sox (play).
• On Debian/Ubuntu WSL: sudo apt install pulseaudio-utils.
• OS support: WSL and native Linux. macOS/Windows-native only if ffmpeg or sox is installed. No raw player found → silently no-ops.

Tuning

Edit src/mainframe.ts: SCALE (blip pitches), GAP_BASE/GAP_JITTER (blip spacing), HUM_LEVEL (hum loudness), WINDOW_MS (how long blips linger after the last update).

Sample audio clip

Audition standalone: bun src/mainframe.ts --audition 8