Linux Candy: linuxwave – generate music from the entropy of Linux

Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We only feature open source software in this series.

Some of the programs in this series are purely cosmetic, frivolous pieces of fun. Candy at their finest. But we also include some programs that aren’t purely decorative.

A diverse range of programs are included in this series. Programs such as eDEX-UI and Variety are actually highly practical programs. ASCIIQuarium has soothing and relaxing qualities for your desktop. Other programs included in this series (such as lolcat, cacafire) are included purely for their decorative qualities. And then there’s some really fun software that just raises a smile or two.

linuxwave is a small utility that’s designed to generate music from the entropy of Linux. What’s entropy? Think of entropy as the computer’s way of getting close to “randomness”.

Computers are incapable, by design, of generating truly random numbers, because no number produced by a mathematical operation is truly random. However, computers can get pretty close with entropy. A Linux machine collates “random numbers” by monitoring different events such as network activity, key-clicks etc. These are fed to the kernel entropy pool, which is used by /dev/random and /dev/urandom. Some programs need to use /dev/random or /dev/uradom as their source of entropy e.g. cryptography tools. linuxwave also uses entropy via /dev/urandom.

Installation

The developer provides binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows. For Linux, there are binaries for different architectures too.

If you want to compile linuxwave, you’ll need Zig (a general-purpose programming language and toolchain). On an Ubuntu system, this can be installed using snap:

$ snap install zig --classic --beta

Clone the project’s GitHub repository and change into the newly created directory:

$ git clone https://github.com/orhun/linuxwave
$ cd linuxwave

Update the git submodules:

$ git submodule update --init --recursive

Now we can build the source.

$ zig build -Drelease-safe

In Operation

linuxwave is a CLI tool, so you’ll want to know the available options. They are listed by issuing the command $ linuxwave --help.

Let’s make a 20 second composition in the C major scale:

$ linuxwave -n 261.63 -d 20 -o music.wav

Here’s the generated wav file.

Summary

The generated wav files in themselves aren’t going to create a piece of music to challenge the greats of minimalism such as Philip Glass. But look what can be achieved with the software if you add some synths and drums, illustrated beautifully with the developer’s video.

Quite impressive to say the least.

The author of linuxwave, Orhun Parmaksız, is best known for kmon, a text-based tool to help you manage the Linux kernel modules and monitor the kernel activities.

Website: github.com/orhun/linuxwave
Support:
Developer: Orhun Parmaksız
License: MIT License

linuxwave is written in Zig. Learn Zig with our recommended free tutorials.

Complete list of articles in this series: