You Are Listening to The New York Times

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.'”

For me, there are two really intriguing aspects of youarelistening.to: the mood the ambient music provides, and how that mood affects your processing of real-time news. You can become immersed in it, like you're a detective working the beat or a tabloid reporter in a neo-noir film. I became interested in exploring what other news and information you could put to music, and in how you could make the music adaptive - adjusting the song selection to enhance the mood around exciting breaking news or provide a laid-back soundtrack for more mellow updates.

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.

Check out at the site new.url2.la and let me know what you think.