Impulse is a bit of eye-candy for your desktop. It is a widget that displays a graphical spectrum analyzer on your gnome desktop. It is written in c and python and uses GTK and cairo graphics to generate the animation. the impulse library creates a pulse audio connection context that reads the output stream from pulseaudio in a thread natively which can then be read from python. You can specify impulse to either output the raw stream or output the fft of the raw stream. Requires: python-gtk2 python-cairo libfftw3-3 libpulse0 Screenlet version requires: screenlets Install: 1) Install packages ( Ubuntu ): sudo apt-get install python-gtk2 python-cairo libfftw3-3 If you are using the screenlets version sudo apt-get install screenlets 2) Download and extract Impulse.tar.bz2 3) Execute program : python Impulse/Impulse.py or doubleclick Impulse.py file and click run If you are using the screenlets version mv Impulse ~/.screenlets/ then open up the screenlets manager and start Impulse