micpeek

Listen to a pulseaudio mic and plot a live spectrum in the terminal.

Install

$ pipx install micpeek

or

$ pipx install micpeek@git+https://github.com/pteromys/micpeek.git

Use

Passed a fire truck going the other way and it's making you anxious? No problem—ssh into the laptop on your desk and just type micpeek to reassure yourself that the fire alarm is not sounding. The gif at the top of the page is a guy saying some words and whistling some scales, whereas this is a fire alarm being tested:

Test it out with your own lovely voice before you use it remotely, so that you can learn baselines for an empty room or open windows or kids playing video games. But if you have to, you could validate it remotely by turning up the volume in alsamixer and playing some music.

Acknowledgements

micpeek is built on the henrikschnor/pasimple pulseaudio python bindings.

Animations were recorded using asciinema in Comic Mono, converted to gif with asciinema/agg, and compressed with this ffmpeg filter:

split[s0][s1];[s0]palettegen=max_colors=256[p];[s1][p]paletteuse=dither=none

Stalking risk ecosystem impact

Low, I hope. While this example lowers the barrier to entry for hooking up a laptop mic to arbitrary code, it can't do speech recognition; and there's creepier stuff out there that's easier to install and use.

Please don't prove me wrong about that, but if you did, please let me know. :(