If your teenaged years were anything like mine, the soundtrack to your angst-ridden after school hours was often provided by Canadian post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and whatever personal turmoil you felt seemed best expressed by anarchist voice samples streamed over stirring instrumentals. But now, you can stop listening to that disgruntled guy talk about how he used to sleep on the beach at Coney Island over and over again and tune into a real-time soundtrack of social turmoil.

You are Listening To is a website that mixes live streams of police radio chatter from New York, Los Angeles and other North American cities with SoundCloud ambient radio, creating a chilling score to accompany images of nighttime cityscapes. As creator Eric Eberhardt told Hyperallergic, the concept came to him when he tuned into soma.fm to listen to the chatter of his city after an epic finale to the World Series. He was struck when he layered the police radio over background music from his own music collection. You are Listening To is the product of his experimentation, a poignant way of tapping into the heartbeat of the city and a testament to the ability of sound to shape our landscape.

by Kelly Chan

posted in Uncategorized

tagged ambient music, Chicago, city, Eric Eberhardt, Montreal, music, new york, Police Chatter, Police Radio, post-rock, Radio, Remix, San Francisco, sound mapping, soundscape, Soundtrack, urban, urbanism

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