What If You Could Hear Your Code?

This post was written about 90% by me, 10% by AI.

Over ten years ago, Gavan Wilhite and I had an idea: a subtle audio track playing inside Sublime Text should reflect your code quality.

We called it Synesthesia – named after the perceptual phenomenon where one sense activates another. Like when numbers or songs have ‘colors’. (As I recall, the name specifically was Gavan’s idea.)

But we never really got the project off the ground. It was too hard; I know nothing about audio engineering. At last, LLMs have put it within reach.

So I’m releasing it today, under a new name, since ‘Synesthesia’ was taken: Synesthete. (That’s the word for someone who has synesthesia.) Here’s the sound of its own code, played from beautiful to cursed:

The music isn’t a canned track. It’s generated from the code itself, line by line, on recorded instruments, so every code base plays its own unique melody. It responds live as you make changes to your code.

Clean code is a harp over a cello section; as quality drops, it slides through marimba, piano and tubular bells down to a singing saw over trembling strings.

The sound is so soothing I actually found myself listening to it for hours as I was testing the package.

With agents, coding has become less about reading files yourself and more about getting a holistic overview of an entire code base. Agents code too quickly to review every single change line by line, and they’ve finally gotten good enough that coders don’t want to compromise on that speed.

Coders now want quick, inexplicit feedback – lightning-like estimates about the code base as a whole. Synesthete gives you that, in the form of sound. It brings emotion into coding.

There’s a visual side, too: a map of every file, colored by its quality:

… and a trippy tunnel in your browser that you fly through, one band per file, lighting up wherever the code changes – simulated below.

You can now listen to your agents change your code in real time. You can sense whether the quality of your code base gets better or worse, without looking at a single line.

Get Synesthete at github.com/dchacke/synesthete.