Have you been lamenting that there’s no way to combine your favorite police scanner channel with some nice ambient music? Of course you haven’t. But you would have been, if you had known in advance just how cool it would sound. In any case, this problem you didn’t even know you had has been solved with the brilliant website mashup You Are Listening To Los Angeles, which is simply a picture of Los Angeles, and the simultaneous streams of ambient music from SoundCloud.com and police radio chatter from Los Angeles. On the surface, this may not sound terribly appealing, but it is in fact amazingly pleasant to listen to. Especially if – like me – you enjoy the brilliant audio work in movies like THX 1138 or Blade Runner, or if you’ve ever enjoyed music by the likes of Bill Nelson or Byrne & Eno. There’s something about the filtering of certain kinds of radio transmissions, combined with their blips and static cutoffs, that make them quite musical. And when layered randomly with certain ambient music, you suddenly have an ever-evolving, and strangely soothing background music. I’ve been listening to it randomly while I work, and eventually got curious about how well it would work with different sources, so I tried some of my own ambient music (embedded below, or you can buy it here) combined with various emergency scanner streams from RadioReference.com. And it seems to work well with just about any stream you pick, provided the music is genuinely “ambient” enough. I chose my tune On The Eve from a benefit CD I did back in 2003, and it worked pretty well with the Chicago Police stream. But who knows if it ever will again. Which is sort of the beauty of this. You Are Listening To Los Angeles was created by Eric Eberhardt , and as of this writing the site says he’ll be adding feeds from other cities soon. If you’re reading Eric, feel free to include the tune below… Like I said, this worked pretty well with the Chicago Police stream.
Have you been lamenting that there’s no way to combine your favorite police scanner channel with some nice ambient music? Of course you haven’t. But you would have been, if you had known in advance just how cool it would sound. In any case, this problem you didn’t even know you had has been solved with the brilliant website mashup You Are Listening To Los Angeles, which is simply a picture of Los Angeles, and the simultaneous streams of ambient music from SoundCloud.com and police radio chatter from Los Angeles. On the surface, this may not sound terribly appealing, but it is in fact amazingly pleasant to listen to. Especially if – like me – you enjoy the brilliant audio work in movies like THX 1138
