Methodology
Mempool as sound (Labs)
0.9.53What each sound on the Labs "Mempool as sound" page means, which stored figure it comes from, and the caps that keep it listenable.
In one sentence
Each kind of waiting transaction gets its own voice, the next-block fee sets the pitch, the backlog is a drone underneath, and each new block strikes a low tone. Every sound comes from a number our own node already stored, and the page shows that number as it plays.
What each sound means
| You hear | It means | Where the number comes from |
|---|---|---|
| A soft sine | Plain payments (standard) arriving | Per-category transaction counts in our node's mempool snapshots |
| A pluck | Inscriptions (ordinal) arriving | Same |
| A bell | Rune transactions arriving | Same |
| A short click | BRC-20 transactions arriving | Same |
| A muted tone | Alkanes transactions arriving | Same |
| How high the notes are | The median fee rate of the next projected block | Our node's projected block 1 |
| A hum, louder and brighter | A deeper backlog (pending size in blocks of 1,000,000 vB) | The mempool's total size from our node |
| One low strike and a chord | A new block; the chord is its 10th, 50th and 90th fee-rate percentiles | Our node's per-block summary |
| The hum dipping | That block clearing part of the backlog | Same |
| A rising whoosh | The next-block fee rose by half or more (and by at least 1 sat/vB) since the last frame | Our node's projected block 1 |
How it's worked out
- Arrivals are net changes. Live mode compares two mempool snapshots taken about 30 seconds apart; time-lapse compares two 5-minute history points. The change in a category's count is arrivals minus whatever a block confirmed in between. A fall is shown as "cleared", never as negative arrivals, so right after a block a voice can go quiet even while new transactions keep coming.
- Density is compressed and capped. A voice plays 0.15 × √(arrivals per minute) notes a second, capped at 6. So a hundredfold bigger wave sounds tenfold busier, not a hundredfold, and a mint wave is dense but never noise. The player also caps how many notes sound at once and drops the extras rather than queueing them.
- Pitch follows fees on a log scale. One octave per tenfold fee: 0.1 sat/vB is C3, 1 sat/vB is C4, 10 is C5, 100 is C6. Notes land on a major pentatonic scale, so any mix of voices stays consonant. Each voice sits in its own register and wanders a few scale steps above the fee's note.
- The drone follows the backlog on a log scale and is silent when the mempool is empty. It is at full volume and brightness from 100 blocks of backlog.
- Time-lapse plays any window (6 hours, 24 hours or 7 days) in about a minute. Seven days is the most there is: our 5-minute history keeps a week. When fewer hours are recorded than you asked for, the page says so and plays only what exists, at the same speed, rather than stretching it. A gap in the recording plays as silence. When there are more than 2.5 blocks per second of playback, each strike stands for the blocks up to the next one.
- The same data always makes the same sound. Where a note falls within its slice of time comes from a seeded generator, not from chance.
Known limits
- Net arrivals undercount when a block lands between two snapshots, because the block's confirmations are subtracted from the same figure.
- Per-category counts need our node's own classification. A snapshot without them plays the backlog only, and the page says so.
- If our node's mempool job stalls, live mode says the snapshot is stale and plays only the backlog.
- This is a Labs experiment: the mapping may change as we hear how it sounds.
Also as plain Markdown. See every methodology page.
Last updated