carrier is a radio built

carrier is a radio built from the open archives.

Its dial runs cool to warm instead of kilohertz, and the needle is drawn by Rive: one artboard, forty-four view-model properties bound live to a Web Audio analyser, so the meters, the lit rail and the needle physics answer the actual broadcast, frame by frame.

What the receiver carries:

Forty-five stations across three wavebands: signal generated as you listen, twelve live feeds from the Audius network, and an archive of 78rpm records, field recordings, netlabel undergrounds and numbers stations, 2,177 records deep, every one rights-clean. City shelves from new york to lagos to tokyo, each built from artists who are the premise.

Every record gets a room: the record's measured brightness and density are matched against a thousand graded photographs, and when both sides carry coordinates, geography breaks the tie. The site will tell you the room is twelve kilometres from where the recording was made.

Stay with a shelf long enough and the photograph hands the room to film: 1,725 found-footage loops, 1960 to 2010, step printed to twelve frames a second, colour verified by measurement, each loop chosen from the playing record's own decade.

Built for the Broadcast and Livestream UI Challenge. Live at carrier.ackrite.co, and the Rive file is public here: https://rive.app/community/files/28448-53786-carrier-a-radio-tuned-by-feeling.

@Rive #RiveBroadcastChallenge