Ambyence.com

Hear the world

Ambyence.com is a personal project that developed from a love of sound.

While searching for live audio feeds I found the wonderful locussonus.com and soundtent.org. I starting listening to the feeds on these sites regularly. I wanted to listen to the live audio but I also wanted a different user experience. From my time listening to the streams I felt there where a few details about the location that helped determine the best experience. These include local time and some aspects of local weather. Local time to help determine dawn and dusk, when birds and other animals are the most active. Local weather to determine rain, and wind.

Focus on the sound

I wanted to UI to be extremely clean and free of clutter. The focus should be on the sound and nothing more. I chose a background of google maps satellite view, with a custom zoom level for each location to improve the visual aesthetic.

The backend is Drupal 8 with specific fields for each attribute. Latitude and longitude are used for the maps, time zone and weather APIs.

A changing world

Since many of the sites do not run 24 hours a day, once an hour a custom module runs a cron job that pings the audio feed endpoints. If there is no response the URL is unpublished and removed from the menu and the sitemap. This means the site fluctuates from a few feeds to many depending on what is responding.

Locations include feeds from the University of Tokyo, a restaurant in the south of France and and a nature reserve in California.

I occasionally search for new feeds. If you have a live feed you’d like to add let me know. If I am using your feed without permission or you would like to update the location information contact me and I will make changes or remove feed entirely.

The next step is to create a feed of my own using a stereo microphones and a Raspberry Pi.