Aleatoric ambientry, CPU usage, and whatnot

People in the past month have asked me if I know of any such notional 
programs as I describe here:

* A program that reflects CPU usage by changes in sound.  Clearly, you 
would go batty if you simply mapped usage to pitch and had "pung pung pung 
PONG PEEENG PEEENG PPEEEEENG pung pung" going on and on and up and down all 
the time.  But one person specifically mentioned the idea of having 
wingchime sounds, and lower CPU activity would mean the windchime sounds 
you hear when there's only a slight breeze (infrequent soft tones), and 
more fervent CPU activity would mean the sounds a windchime makes when it's 
gusty out (louder more frequent tones).
Does anyone know of anything like this?
If anyone's looking for a fun weekend project, and has the programming 
skills to write this (whether in Perl or not), I encourage this!

* Similarly, a program that would reflect CPU usage in some other medium 
other than just a GUI "tachometer" dial.  For example, the color of the 
active window's menubar could vary depending on usage -- you get the idea.
(Altho clearly you wouldn't want the activity of the CPU meter to indicate 
this via something that would actually cause inordinate CPU activity; but 
this is where clever hacks come in.

A specific idea that some clever #perl person thought of was having LEDs 
under a translucent case change their color with the CPU activity.

And there's nothing magic about CPU activity -- other interesting things 
could be  CPU temperature, network utilization (in some finer expression 
than just the bright rapidly-flickering green/amber LEDs we now have), etc.


I'm not convinced that any of these ideas are guaranteed to be rivetingly 
useful, but I think it would be great fun to try it out and see how it 
feels.  That's always the way with interface elements as with music, I 
think -- the proof is as much in the pudding as the devil is in the details.
--
Sean M. Burke    http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/