/adsbTheremin

Turns received ADS-B radio transmissions into music

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adsbTheremin

Turns received ADS-B radio transmissions into music

Why?

Why not? Turn everything in our environment into music.

Think about a theremin - a musical instrument played by bringing your hands in proximity to an antenna on the instrument. What if that antenna was your house, and instead of human hands, our instrument was played by airplanes flying overhead?

This code listens to ADSB [https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/] trasmissions from aircraft, and turns those trasmission into music.

Info about output format of dump1090:

http://www.airnavsystems.com/forum/index.php?topic=2896.0

To run this code, you need access to a computer that is running dump1090. I'm running it on a Raspberry Pi Zero using the FlightAware distro (https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/build). This allows you to supply your received data to network of ground stations that, in a crowdsourced fashion, feed data to a web site that lets anyone see which aircraft are overhead.

You'll also need a music synthesizer - I use Ableton Live, but any VST plugin host should work. In fact, the really creative part of this is deciding what to do with the aircraft data. I've chosen to make some very ambient tracks, but there's no reason this raw data coudn't be turned into speedmetal. I hope someone will do that at some point.

Some recent sonifications using this code:

Long Airport Pads

Serene Skies

Gordon Good velo27@yahoo.com