Allan Karl checks in with a sickening story about how Clear Channel, the radio broadcasting megamonolith, has developed a database-driven “DJ” that can be programmed to deliver different song sequences to different geographic regions, reducing costs and satisfying FCC “local audience” requirements. They digitized a bunch of words and phonemes and can create sentences on the fly. Allan’s got some other good background essays posted on the topic of radio today.
February 8, 2003