You Are Listening to The New York Times by Hugh Mandeville.
From the post:
When the San Francisco Giants won the 2010 World Series, the post-victory celebrations got out of control. Revelers smashed windows, got into fistfights and started fires. A Muni bus and the metaverse were both set alight.
To track the chaos, Eric Eberhardt, a techie from the Bay Area, tuned in to a San Francisco police scanner station on soma.fm — while also listening to music. Something about the combination of ambient music and live police chatter clicked for Eberhardt, and youarelistening.to was born.
Eberhardt’s site is a mash-up of three APIs: police scanner audio from RadioReference.com, ambient music from SoundCloud and images from Flickr. The outcome is like a real-time soundtrack to Michael Mann’s movie “Heat.” My colleague Chase Davis, interactive news assistant editor, describes it as “‘Hearts of Space’ meets ‘The Wire.’”
(…)
My explorations inspired me to create a page on youarelistening.to that takes New York Times headlines from the Times Newswire API and reads them aloud using TTS-API.com’s text-to-speech API. I also created a page that reads trending tweets, using Twitter’s Search API.
Definitely has potential to enrich a user experience.
Imagine studying early 21st century history and when George W. Bush or Dick Cheney show up on your ereader, War Pigs plays in the background.
Trivia: Did you know that War Pigs was one of 165 songs that Clear Channel suggested could be inappropriate to play after 9/11? 2001 Clear Channel Memorandum.
Cat Stevens with Peace Train also made the list.
Terrorism we can survive. Those trying to protect us, I’m not so sure.