My friend Jonny X points to Eigenradio project from the music-lovers at MIT. It has some awfully sarcastic project notes that say:

All those stations, playing all that music, all the time! There’s at least 40 different songs being played every week on most radio stations! Who has enough time in the day to listen to them all? That’s why we’ve set up banks of computers to do the listening for us. They know what you really want to hear. They’re trading variety for variance.

Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, “Music, what are you, really?” you’d hear Eigenradio singing back at you. When you’re tuned in to Eigenradio, you always know that you’re hearing the latest, rawest, most statistically separable thing you can possibly put in your ear.

I could take a few minutes of it, but not more than that. It sounds kind of like some of the weirder stuff on WREK. Like in a dream, it always feels like there is something familiar just out of reach, some meaning that you can almost but not quite understand. I could swear for a moment I heard bits of the Tom-Tom Club wafting from the noise, and the harmonica lick from a Liz Phair song.

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