Radio Vox Populi

a group of webloggersOver the past week I’ve been working on turning weblogs into an art installation. I really wanted to visualize in some way the current activity within the weblog world. Riding an early title from blogdex (”wired vox populi“), I thought it would be interesting to see what the voice of the people actually sounded like. To accomplish this feat, I enlisted some simple off-the-shelf linux tools. The result is Radio Vox populi.

The system takes the update monitor from blo.gs and crawls them using a simple perl robot (LWP::Parallel); in the event that RSS feeds are provided to blo.gs, these are crawled immediately, and for others RSS autodiscovery is used to find RSS feeds. The first post from each RSS feed is then saved.

The text of these posts is cleaned up (and abbreviated in the case that it’s exceptionally long), and run through the Festival Speech Synthesis System using a number of different voices. These corresponding voice-posts are sent out to the sound card in the order that they were received, punctuated by a few different radio-tuning noises (thanks to Andy). The output of this sound is streamed to the web in real time using the Icecast streaming media server.

For the installation I wanted to give the sound an old-radio warmth so I bought an antiqueish Irish tube radio (circa 1960) for a striking price of €30:

that warm old-radio sound
My first Irish radio

The installation currently uses an 1/8″ to 1960’s radio adapter that I threw together (it has a phono-in in the shape of european power plugs) but I hope to build a low-power AM transmitter soon so that it has that the signal fits the era of the radio.

Right now the piece is installed at the Media Lab Europe, but I’ll be bringing it back to the Media Lab sometime next week. Of course it’ll also be available on the web 24 hours a day.

March 3, 2004 #
18 comments

16 Comments

  1. nick
    Posted March 3, 2004 at 12:32 pm | Permalink

    very cool. also a little creepy. but still cool.

  2. Eliot
    Posted March 3, 2004 at 1:21 pm | Permalink

    I may be being thick here, but where’s the stream?

  3. cameron
    Posted March 3, 2004 at 1:24 pm | Permalink

    If you scroll down there are two streams, high and low (both m3u files that point to streaming mp3s).

  4. Eliot
    Posted March 3, 2004 at 1:25 pm | Permalink

    Ok, I’m definitely thick. Too many Stellas last night. Sorry.

  5. Dinah
    Posted March 3, 2004 at 3:53 pm | Permalink

    Amazing. I keep thinking I’m going to turn it off, but it’s too fascinating.

  6. Nick
    Posted March 3, 2004 at 9:07 pm | Permalink

    This has got to be one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in a long time.

    I just saw part of the Son et Lumiere at the List Visual Arts Center. The installation by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin was so inspiring and powerful it’s made me want to re-learn my electronics skills to make something so cool :-)
    Oh, and btw, the feeds that are in other languages are hilarious :-)

  7. Chuck Olsen
    Posted March 5, 2004 at 2:49 am | Permalink

    Cameron, this is absolutely genius and quite possibly historic.

  8. TD
    Posted March 5, 2004 at 5:31 pm | Permalink

    wow this is incredible…

  9. Gordon
    Posted March 6, 2004 at 7:56 am | Permalink

    Strangely compelling.

  10. Jamie Zawinski
    Posted March 6, 2004 at 5:52 pm | Permalink

    This is very cool! For a visual hack reminiscent of this, try out the “fontglide” and “ljlatest” programs I wrote for xscreensaver — “fontglide -program ljlatest”. It takes the latest posts from LiveJournal and rolls the text across the screen in a very “designey” way, making the most banal things look like slogans.

  11. Heather
    Posted March 6, 2004 at 6:07 pm | Permalink

    Wow! That is very interesting. Great concept!
    I am an artist myself, so I appreciate this from that point of view.

  12. V
    Posted March 9, 2004 at 6:31 am | Permalink

    Is the link still there? I don’t see it anyplace?

  13. Andrew Grumet
    Posted March 9, 2004 at 1:41 pm | Permalink

    This is really interesting.

    I wonder, what tool uses “continue reading on my site”? Google returns no results.

  14. cameron
    Posted April 14, 2004 at 11:10 am | Permalink

    The “continue reading on my site” phrase is generated by the system in the case that the post is too long to be read out in a timely manner. Posts are cut off if they exceed a certain number of words, and “continue reading” is slapped on the end. It was the most convenient way to play all of the weblogs while still taking turns.

  15. Scott Gowell
    Posted September 22, 2004 at 8:44 pm | Permalink

    Is this project still operational?

  16. Melissa Haworth
    Posted September 24, 2004 at 1:28 pm | Permalink

    also wondering if the project is still operational- can’t get radiovox to load.

One Trackback

  1. By Confessions of a G33k on April 14, 2004 at 12:29 pm

    radio vox populi

    I noticed someone picking up my feed at the MIT Media Lab Europe, I follow the IP address and…

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*