Music and sound · by Hatnote (Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi)

Listen to Wikipedia

A live sound-and-bubble view of Wikipedia edits as they happen: added text rings a bell, removed text plucks a string, and bigger edits play deeper notes.

It turns the world's encyclopedia being written in real time into calm ambient music you can leave running.

LiveCommercial: conditions

Open listen.hatnote.com ↗ agent.md

For your project

Official API: No official API
Data download: No bulk download found
License: BSD-style license (source code) the app's source code; edit data comes from Wikipedia
Commercial use: Commercial use with conditions
“Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:” raw.githubusercontent.com/hatnote/listen-to-wikip...
Credit: Credit required
“Copyright (c) 2013, Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi” raw.githubusercontent.com/hatnote/listen-to-wikip...
Embedding: Embedding unclear
Using the website: Free

Read on Listen to Wikipedia's own pages on Oct 23, 2026 · license or terms. Check the license page before you ship.

For your agent

No official API. An agent should not scrape the site: use it by hand.

Fork the GitHub repo (BSD-style) and feed it from Wikimedia EventStreams; the page's own websocket (wss://wikimon.hatnote.com/v2/) is Hatnote's relay, not a documented public API.
Keep the BSD copyright notice and conditions when reusing the code
Wikipedia edit data is under Wikimedia's licenses; credit Wikipedia

Paste into your agent: Read https://agentgid.com/resources/listen-to-wikipedia/agent.md before using Listen to Wikipedia.

What you can build

Ambient sound from live Wikipedia editsA web page that plays a soft note for every Wikipedia edit happening now, like Listen to Wikipedia, built on the public edit stream.

A self-hosted sonification of edits on one language Wikipedia or one topic, forked from the open-source code
An ambient 'office soundscape' display that plays live edits on a wall screen
A teaching demo of real-time streams: same idea fed by GitHub or OpenStreetMap change feeds

More in Music and sound

All 7 →

Musicmap You can trace how one style grew out of another across a century, click any node, and hear typical tracks from that branch. Non-commercial Radiooooo It turns a map into a time machine for your ears; pick a country and a decade and hear what was playing there. Non-commercial Radio Garden Moving a dot across the planet and hearing the radio change from one town to the next makes distance feel very small. LiveLicense unclear Tunefind It answers the 'what was that song?' question for a specific scene of a show. License unclear Music For Programming An ad-free, artist-curated series whose track lists double as a guide to quiet electronic music. DownloadNon-commercial myNoise Each soundscape works like an instrument you tune yourself with sliders, rather than a fixed loop. Commercial: conditions

Something wrong or out of date? Tell us.