SURVIVAL APPSThe music that stays on when I'm not there
The bench in the Officina is never silent, not even when it looks empty. There's the fan rising and falling with the build, the clicking when I'm really typing and not just thinking about it, and for a few months now a second monitor that does nothing useful: it runs a loop, over a track I didn't write, and it doesn't stop until I stop it. I almost never look at it. I just listen, the way you keep a radio on in a real workshop so you don't hear the silence of someone working alone.
Background sound is not a detail
Anyone who builds alone learns early that total silence doesn't help you concentrate (not always, anyway): it helps you hear every stray thought that pulls you away. A background — music, white noise, the murmur of a recorded environment — fills the space that would otherwise get filled by everything else. It doesn't have to be interesting. It just has to be there, long enough that you don't have to think about it twice.
From this very practical need came a small tool, written for me before anyone else: a script that takes a royalty-free track and a video I made, and stretches both to cover a magic running time of uninterrupted playback — currently set to 42 minutes, the length that felt most honest between "long enough to forget about it" and "light enough to upload without waiting until evening". The video repeats every few seconds, the music at its own natural pace: two independent loops that overlap without ever landing on the same point, so the whole never sounds like a broken record.
> target duration: 42 min
> track license: Creative Commons BY 4.0[1]
> status: IN ROTATION
The last three uploaded
Three of these loops just went up on the Survival Apps YouTube channel[2], listed from the most recent upload: (click the image to listen)
- COMPANION DURING ESCAPE — the newest of the three, the one running while I write this transmission
- WATER AND FLOWERS — the slowest of the three, made more to linger than to accompany
- DIATOMEA CHANTING WHILE RUNNING — the first one uploaded, still the one that plays most often on my second monitor
Some evenings, coming back to the bench after a break, I find the loop already started over a while ago — which probably just means I never stopped it. May your code survive the apocalypse, and may something stay on in the background even when you stop listening to it.
Notes
- Creative Commons BY 4.0 — the tracks used in these three videos are by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), free to use with attribution required: the full credit appears in the description of each video. ↑ back to text
- Survival Apps YouTube channel — youtube.com/@survivalapps, where these ambient loops end up alongside the app content. ↑ back to text