Anastasia, Cristian: Music of the Spheres

The widget is based on the philosophical concept of the Music of the Spheres, a concept from the first century BC, according to which the sky is composed of concentric spheres that rotate in harmonious relationships.Starting from this concept, we decided to add sounds to the graphics.
Graphically, the system consists of six concentric white circles, three for each user, differentiated by two different opacities. The three circles are differentiated by the thickness of the line, and their radius is proportional to the value of the variables considered. Specifically, the radius of the thickest circle represents the percentage of battery life, the medium radius represents CPU usage, and the thinnest represents the percentage of RAM used.

For each user, each circle was then linked to a frequency, so that the three circles for each user together create a major chord. Specifically, for user 1, the three notes C, E, and G form the C major chord. For the second user, the notes G, B, and D form the G major chord, which has higher frequencies than C major. The value of the three variables is linked to the volume of each note, so the result will be a superposition of two groups of three notes for each user, for a total of six frequencies.

The resulting timbre will therefore be clearer the higher the values ​​of the variables for user 2 are compared to user 1, and vice versa. In addition, the value of the mouse’s X coordinate controls the value of its own volume, from a value of 0% for the position X=0 and 100% for a value of X=1920. This way, it is possible to adjust the volume of your computer and listen to the other user’s data independently. By having two different timbres on the two computers receiving the data from both users, these can be used as speakers for stereo listening.

This video demonstrates the use of a single widget to display its graphics.

This video shows how the widget changes by opening applications that increase CPU and RAM usage of both users.

An alternative version of the graphic design was created by filling each user’s circles with a specific color, with an opacity of 0.5. This way, the overlapping of the various circles creates a play of colors that combine to generate new hues. For this case, we chose to make the window background completely transparent to allow interaction with the background color as well.