A few years back I tuned into the Silophone - somebody had the neat idea of using an abandoned grain silo's natural echo chambers as a sonic experiment, piping sound into the empty building and then playing it back to the user. That the site was based in Montreal's Vieux Port was a bonus to me. On the web there's a list of sound files to choose from, and anybody can add sound clips to that list - I'd added a few fun sounds long ago and then forgotten about them until I booked this trip. Then I pulled up the website and discovered I'd have to click through two hundred pages of new additions each time I wanted to find my old sound bites.
Now that I think of it, I could have just added those sounds back to the silo and they would have shown up at the top. Shut up.
I'd just finished a tutorial on the Perl programming language (popular for website form processing) and decided to get in some practice. So I pulled up the Python website robot I'd built right after learning that language, walked it through the 13000 sound files (name, author, trigger id) in the silo server, created a couple of database tables on my personal server (the one you're reading right now) and rolled out Silodex: the Silophone search engine. If you want to find all the Simpsons or South Park sounds in there, go to the Silodex. Click & enjoy.
I spend a fair amount of time waiting for people to phone into the silo to hear their words echo back. Then I unload a torrent of pre-recorded burps and foghorns on them. Life is good.
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