{skyphone}

The goal of {skyphone} is to create an audio version of a GitHub Skyline in R.

Skyline is a novelty webservice from GitHub. You input a username and can ‘view a 3D model of your GitHub contribution graph.’ It looks a bit like a city skyline, hence the name.

{skyphone} is an exploratory package that fetches the contributions data from the Skyline API and puts it in a nice, tidy table that you can sonify (i.e. convert to an audio signal) or plot. You can read more in a blog post.

Note: The GitHub Skyline API—on which {skyphone} depends—stopped responding (i.e. it 404s) soon after the package was created. I may fix {skyphone} in future to work via {gh} instead; feel free to contribute.

Installation

You can install the {skyphone} package from GitHub:

remotes::install_github("matt-dray/skyphone")

This assumes you’ve already installed {remotes} from CRAN with install.packages("remotes")

Examples

The sky_get() function fetches from the Skyline API a named user’s (open) contributions for a given year. Here’s what it looks like to fetch my own contributions for 2020:

library(skyphone)
md <- sky_get("matt-dray", 2020)
md

#> # A tibble: 366 x 6
#>    user       year  week   day date       count
#>    <chr>     <int> <int> <int> <date>     <int>
#>  1 matt-dray  2020     1     1 2020-01-01     5
#>  2 matt-dray  2020     1     2 2020-01-02     5
#>  3 matt-dray  2020     1     3 2020-01-03     8
#>  4 matt-dray  2020     1     4 2020-01-04     3
#>  5 matt-dray  2020     2     5 2020-01-05     0
#>  6 matt-dray  2020     2     6 2020-01-06     7
#>  7 matt-dray  2020     2     7 2020-01-07    10
#>  8 matt-dray  2020     2     8 2020-01-08     2
#>  9 matt-dray  2020     2     9 2020-01-09     6
#> 10 matt-dray  2020     2    10 2020-01-10     0
#> # … with 356 more rows

You can hear contributions over time by passing the output from sky_get() to sky_sonify(). This function uses the {sonify} package to convert the data to audio format, where peaks are higher pitched.

sky_sonify(md, play = FALSE, out_dir = NULL)

#> 
#> WaveMC Object
#>  Number of Samples:      220500
#>  Duration (seconds):     5
#>  Samplingrate (Hertz):   44100
#>  Number of channels:     2
#>  PCM (integer format):   TRUE
#>  Bit (8/16/24/32/64):    16

You’ll hear the output from your speakers if you set play = TRUE and/or save the audio file as a .wav to the folder provided by out_dir.

🔈 Click here to listen to the sonified output from this example.

I’ve also included a simple, opinionated plotting function called sky_plot, which gives you a 2D representation of your ‘skyline’.

p <- sky_plot(md)
p

Thanks

To GitHub, obviously. To Matt Kerlogue for the nerdsnipe. To Den Delimarsky for writing about the Skyline API.

GitHub terms

You can read GitHub’s terms and privacy statement for their service.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the {skyphone} project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.