choir.io

Today, I'm raising the veil (slightly) on a new project - choir.io. The most succinct description of choir.io is that it is a service that turns events into sound. Why would you want to do that? Well, I believe that there are compelling reasons to make sound part of your monitoring stack. Let's see if I can convince you.

The soundscape

When I walk into my study every morning, I'm surrounded a rich, subtle soundscape that exists just beneath conscious perception. My air-conditioner, computers and monitors all emit hums and purrs. I can "tune in" to these if I focus, but they usually only draw my attention when something changes. When the power goes out there is a deathly silence, when a CPU fan noise changes pitch or texture, it bothers me immediately.

Layered over this background are more obtrusive sounds, closer to the threshold of awareness - the clacking of keyboards, faint noises of my family getting ready for their day upstairs, the front door opening and closing. Whether or not I pay attention to these is somewhat context dependent. Am I waiting, or instance, for my wife and kids to start trooping down the stairs so I can join them for my son's swimming lesson? If I am, I listen out for those sounds specifically. I get an enormous amount of information about my world from these more discrete, event-related noises.

Finally, there are the really obtrusive sounds, things that immediately get my attention. This might be someone saying my name, my phone ringing, a knock at the door, or a smoke alarm. I'm very aware of these, and they usually signal something I have to deal with immediately.

These layers of more and less obtrusive sounds form a soundscape that is ever-present, and utterly necessary in our day-to-day lives. Notice how effortless this process of extracting meaning from our ambient sounds is. Our minds process this information stream without any mental exertion, filters out what we don't need to notice, and draws our attention to what we do. There's a lot of cognitive research (that I might delve into in future posts) that show that our brains and auditory systems are specifically designed to make sense of the world in this way.

We have nothing like this rich texture of ambient awareness for the technology that surrounds us. Our monitoring mechanisms seem to be stuck at the ends of the intrusiveness spectrum. At one end, we have email notifications that demand our attention until we start to ignore them or silence them with a filter. At the other end we have passive status dashboards that require us to remember to switch context and visually consult a different interface. Choir.io doesn't aim to supplant either of these, but tries to fill in the blank portion of the awareness spectrum between them.

When I sit at my desk, I can hear our server architecture humming away. There's the subtle pitter-patter of hits to various webservers, the occasional clack of an SSH login. Occasionally there is a chime when @alexdong pushes to Github, followed shortly by the celebratory cheer of a server deploy. When I hear the jarring note of a 500 server error, I switch context to view logs or a dashboard, but otherwise my focus stays with my editor window. Choir is young, but it's already become an indispensable part of my life.

Challenges and next steps

There are a number of key questions that we'd like to answer with the help of our intrepid early adopters. First among these is the question of soundscape design. What makes a good sound pack? What is the right mix of intrusive and non-intrusive sounds? How do we construct soundscapes that blend into the background like natural sounds do? Another set of questions surrounds the API and integration. What is the right blend of simplicity and power is in the API? Which services should we integrate with next?

There are some obvious next steps in the works. We recognize that sound pack design is a deep problem with subjective solutions. So, letting users assemble, edit and eventually share their own sound packs is high on our list of priorities. Free-standing Choir.io player apps for Windows and OSX will also be on the way soon, so you won't need to remember to keep a browser tab open. Technical improvements to the API that are on the way include UDP and SSL support.

Choir is trying to do something new, and we want as much feedback as early in the process as possible. So, we've decided to start sending out invites today, even though Choir is far from the polished system that it will be in a few months. If you're brave, willing to give frank feedback, and want to help us explore this exciting idea, please request an invite.