troooba

troooba is a low-resource, non-AI, generative music and sound app. It has a variety of preset modes that are updated periodically and will play as long as you want without ever repeating.

troooba does NOT use artificial intelligence, it uses real intelligence instead. This app also does NOT stream audio from a remote server. It has a very low environmental footprint, it uses very little memory, collects ZERO data, uses very little battery and can playback originally generated music and sound for endless hours.

troooba is an experiment to see whether it is possible to create original music and soundscapes with the smallest environmental footprint on the Earth as possible. Streaming music through YouTube or Spotify ultimately uses a vast amount of fresh, potable water. Two billion people do not have access to clean water. (United Nations) The data centers that host these services use that water to cool the servers that deliver the content we consume. For example, ChatGPT-3 used approximately 700,000 liters of water to train its model, which equates to 500ml for the average use case. (source)

A few years ago, I was mildly horrified by the amount of people who listen to music and soundscapes via YouTube for hours, sometimes all night long. I thought this was such a waste of resources but I understood the demand, people like to study, sleep or rest to background music and sounds. Here is a comparison:

If comparing water consumption, that equates to the following troooba listener ratio:

• 1 YouTube listener for every 51,476,000 troooba users.
• 1 Spotify listener for every 10,295,200 troooba users.

Clearly, troooba uses much less water. In creating troooba I wanted to engage with the following challenge:

• *To create a way to listen to music and sound for an indefinite time period with the most variability in content. (*see note below)
• Use the least amount of resources possible, both direct and indirect. (troooba downloads 1kb of data each time it’s loaded, but it can also work in airplane mode.)
• To have the smallest memory footprint on the installed device. (troooba is ~5-25MB)
• NEVER collect user data.
• Lowest battery consumption as possible. (troooba is comparable to a streaming music service’s battery consumption.)

*Content quality and preference is very subjective. Some may not like the music or sounds troooba generates at all. Some may love it. Regardless, the challenge is still valid.

Can you beat the troooba challenge?

15,140 drops of water = 1 gallon. (USGS)

Streaming 1 hour of Netflix is approximately .009-.037 kWh on the average phone. (IEA.org)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) uses about .19 L/kWh, on average this is close to 550,000 gallons per day, per data center. (https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/)

Roughly 2 billion people do not have access to clean, potable water. (United Nations)