The Sound of People getting Rich (or the Sound of People Losing Everything)

A Live blockchain explorer sonifying the blockchain



This project was based on the notion of a blockchain explorer, which is a website that retrieves live data from the blockchain to present the current status of that blockchain. This explorer is novel however, in that it uses that data to generate live musical and visual responses using both chance and deterministic methods.

It uses the Infura.io endpoint and API to retrieve live data from the blockchain. The data includes: the latest block number, the last transaction hash (number of the last transaction), block difficulty (how hard it was to mine), block size (total amount of data included in that block in bytes) and Gas Used (total gas used by all transaction in that block). When a new block is added to the blockchain the webpage receives updated values for theses parameters. If a change in certain values is detected it triggers a change in both the generated graphics and the music. The audio is synthesised with Tone.js and the visuals are created using a Processing sketch running in Processing.js.

This explorer is no longer live, but it's operation is documented in the video above.