A musical representation of GitHub's activity timeline.
... Or at least an attempt to make it musical.
This is the sound of people committing, pushing, starring, forking, and more if you listen closely. This music was directly generated from data harvested from the GitHub Archive timeline. Each sound corresponds to a specific event occurring on the GitHub platform for the last two years (2012-03 to 2014-08). Those elements represent the overall GitHub activity, repositories being created, file uploads, and forks.
This project represents as sound, in a chronological order, GitHub. A musical log journal.
Don't forget to click on the green button in the menu bar (up right) to activate the graphs showing corresponding data in a more traditionnal way. Unfortunately, they go out of sync at the end because of a music generation delay problem, sorry about that.
Indeed. Randomly occurring events with random chaotic frequencies (that are proportional to the actual frequencies of events) never made good music. But I tried to make it a little better with a "beautified" version, that fixes the problem of mismatching frequencies, and allows events to occur at a less random time. However, this version is less accurate regarding the data it represents. You can play it right now on this very page by clicking on this button :
And no, it's still not pleasant to hear.
You'll find plenty of explanation and other info on the project's wiki, but for now, imagine that the baseline you hear in the background represents the overall GitHub activity (the higher the pitch, the higher the activity). Each beep you hear represents an active repository's creation date (with a limit of 400 repositories), and the beats occur when an amount of 1.4 TB of data is uploaded to GitHub.
As of the parts labelled as "Fork Trees" they represent a traversal (Depth-First) of a tree where each branch is a fork. The names entered as comments are the names of the root repositories.
I'm glad you ask ;p. There are plenty of things to do/know/hear about this. This project was conducted as an entry for the Annual GitHub Data Challenge (2014 edition). It thus comes with a nice repository on GitHub where you can see how the data was harvested, processed, organized, and where you can even contribute.
You can get lots of information on the project's wiki too, such as long and boring texts explaining what exactly the elements featured in the music represent, instructions to make your very own version and cool links to cool stuff.
There's a lot of things to do if this project interrests you. If it doesn't, well you can still check out the work of the other contestants, there's some great stuff to see :)
Huge activity peak. Reason unknown (yet).
Small activity peak as the PLD-Linux distribution switches from CVS to Git. GitHub user mmazur (PLD-Linux team) realizes alone 18% of the entire GitHub activity that week.
Beginning Autumn 2012, activity is disrupted, due to a "major service outage" at GitHub. Short, fortunately, but the following season being rather calm, I raise you cocos2d's cocos2d-x's Forktree (see wiki)
Activity low point. How unexpected.
Data upload rate accelerates drastically (~3 times faster). Reason unknown (yet).
Activity low point, reason unknown. "Back to school" effect ?
Activity described as "so damn low" by our experts.
Again a calm season, let's listen to gabrielecirulli's 2048's Fork tree.
For more information on Fork Trees, see the project's wiki.