Forget Noise-Cancelling Headphones: Just Listen to Wikipedia Being Edited

Trying to buckle down and work? Noise-cancelling headphones aren’t the only mellow way to drown out your co-workers’ incessant chattering or the whirring of a coffee machine at your local café. Try listening to the dulcet tones of Wikipedia being edited in real time.

Listen to Wikipedia is a site and app that that draws from Wikipedia’s recent changes feed to translate the sum of the tweaks into a chilled-out symphony. (Click through to give it a listen.) Bells denote additions to a page, and plucked strings represent deletions. Synthesized strings swell and fall in the background. Larger revisions yield more resonant notes. It uses a pentatonic scale to avoid screeching dissonance. (Think: tones produced by xylophones and lutes.)