NPR newscasts, sliced, diced and scrambled three ways

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Here’s a worthwhile diversion for your Friday: creative remixes of six years of NPR newscasts.

Artist and engineer Gregor Hochmuth released Thursday three projects incorporating audio from 50,000 of the network’s newscasts, slicing and dicing them both visually and aurally.

“Much of the news’ power, much of our ritualized experience with the news, derives from its consistency: the same time, the same voice, the same point of view, the same inability to change it,” Hochmuth wrote in a post on Medium. “I was interested in breaking this consistency, hoping to offer a series of projects that reinterpret the news in very different ways.”

Truth & Quantity generates a dizzying litany of numbers used in NPR newscasts; you can hear all the numbers used in a month, for example, or also find all uses of a particular number. Silent Sky, designed for mobile devices, makes collages of silences extracted from the newscasts.

And my favorite, Don’t Play with Your News, lets you make magnetic poetry–style jumbles out of phrases delivered by the likes of Korva Coleman, Jack Speer and Lakshmi Singh. Here’s one of my creations (listen here):

Screen Shot 2016-03-11 at 11.51.07 AM

Have at it, and fill your earbuds and cubicles with Dadaist nonsense.

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