Andre Castro, Radio Liberte Egalite Beyonce, 2012

Andre Castro, Radio Liberté Equalité Beyoncé, 2012, 2, 1

Description

Liberté, Equalité, Beyoncé constitutes a prototype of online radio station, created from audio material continuously picked up from archive.org. The station streams an hourly schedule of programs. Each program is formed by combining two factors: a specific sound universe and a topic; this combination is actualized in two steps:

1) collecting (daily) online texts on the topic in question (eg: weather forecast; cookery; poems) from rss-feeds;

2) querying the archive.org for sounds tagged under each of the words which constitutes the collected text, without a specific archive's collection (eg: classical music, old 78rpm records, hiphop, spoken-word );

The project's front-end http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/~acastro/radio/ contains an embedded player currently play file metadata display (when present), including a link to archive.org's file location.

Technology employed

python script: to collect the rss-feeds, query archive.org API, and generate playlists from the archive's sub-collections;

liquidsoap: to manage the stream scheduling by: alternating playlists, introducing jingles, and reading the files' metadata; Sending the sound output to icecast2

icecast2: to broadcast the sound stream to online listeners

html5/javascript: to embed the sound stream into the website

Aims

explore and understand the specificities of the archive.org, using some of the possibilities offered by its API to query its contents.

experiment with online sound streaming and scheduling

create a serendipitous system within the archive, which aims to allow for unexpected audio items to emergence

create an alternative interface to the database, with a more narrative format

encourage the emergence discourses within the archive.

promote archive.org - a open, communitarian archive, without a direct relation to power structures and, for the most part,a product of its users' contributions.