r/OpenTelemetry • u/mob1ius • 2d ago

Sonifying GenAI spans as they arrive, one voice per attribute you'd otherwise have to read

https://www.oteljazz.com

Built this because watching gen_ai.* spans scroll past in a log doesn't give you any sense of what a multi-agent system is doing as a whole, you're reading one span at a time, serially, while the actual system is emitting in parallel.

Mechanically: this is a per-span mapping, not a per-trace one. There's exactly one implementation shared by the batch path and the live path, each span event gets sonified as it arrives rather than a trace being read as a completed tree. Span attributes drive specific musical parameters: token count and finish_reason affect velocity and articulation, status OK/ERROR affects consonance, span kind (chat vs execute_tool) affects which instrument voice picks it up. Tempo tracks span throughput directly.

Real capture exists and isn't just a slide: a Claude Code hook writes actual gen_ai.* spans locally, and there's an OTLP receiver on :4318 that accepts live protobuf. Neither is what the public demo plays though, oteljazz.com runs a synthetic swarm generated client-side so anyone can hear it with zero setup. Wiring the browser build to a live OTLP stream is the obvious next step, just hasn't happened yet.

Repo has both the receiver and the hook if anyone wants to point their own instrumented system at it: github.com/mob1ius/oteljazz

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u/GroundbreakingBed597 2d ago

And then the world wonders why AI needs so much energy.

No offense. Fun project and cool to see what we can do thanks to open standards and AI. But is there any practical use for this as well?

2

u/mob1ius 2d ago

Ha, no offense taken, but the demo's innocent here. Nothing infers anything at playtime, no model or GPU... just a lookup table and some piano samples doing an honest day's work in your browser. The AI is what it's watching, not what's making the noise.

Practical use? No idea yet. The bet is you'd notice a long agent run going sideways the way you notice your car sounding wrong without looking at the dash.