I don't listen to the radio a whole lot, but when I do, lately it's AM. You see, AM become pretty obsolete, which means it's become cheap, which means any wingnut with enough bananas can get on the air. Weird stuff is proliferating again on America's airwaves. Of course, a lot of the wingnuts are christian wingnuts, but they're entertaining in their own way. Heck, I just heard a modern, full-cast audio drama on earlier this week, on the radio. It was good! And produced by Focus on The Family, which I find amusing, but who else does that anymore? Radio is an interesting medium, and I maintain that the more primitive the radio system, the more interesting it continues to be. Look at XM, for instance. 3700 channels, all carefully programmed and crystal clear wherever you are. There is never any question of what you'll hear, where you can hear it, or how it will sound. Now compare that with shortwave radio, all the way at the other end of the spectrum. With shortwave, you never know what you'll find when you turn on your receiver, if someone will be having a conversation or making a broadcast, or where in the world it's coming from, or if more than one person is trying to use the same frequency at the same time, or if you'll get anything at all. You can still sometimes find spy numbers broadcasts in shortwave alongside police scanners and conspiracy theory shows and truckers and music and god knows what else. It's adventurous and interesting. AM is  by it's nature less orderly than satellite or FM, and it's been getting crazier at it's gotten cheaper. On a clear day you can listen to broadcasts from all over your planetary quadrant with just the receiver built into your car. You can hear what happens when the signals of two different stations, hundreds or thousands of miles apart, cross their signals. And, thanks to the thriving time-brokered AM market, you can hear some righteously weird shit. Yes, I'm weird, sometimes I'll listen to radio static because it has a particularly interesting sound to it. Not the point. So all this gave me the idea one day to see if I could simulate the sound of multiple radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency. It's a distinctive sound. And that idea tumbled around in my head for a few months, and I had a pretty good idea of how to make it happen, and then my head turned towards podcasting. Because everything is about podcasting. I thought I might be able to use this (theoretical) technique to make a little statement about what it's like trying to be a podcaster. You see, there are about 50 podcasts out there with really world-class audiences, about a thousand with very worthy numbers, and there's the rest of us hoping one day to be noticed by anyone at all. While the Top 20 Podcast list on iTunes has gone through some changes lately and for the better (no more Oprah or Joel Osteen, thank god), it's still very much a place where the whales just trade places with each other and suck up most of the listening hours themselves. So you want to know what it's like to get heard? This is what it's like to get heard. Your voice pokes out now and then, if you're lucky, but mostly you're drowned out by the big boys, and your message gets destroyed, and then everyone else gets stomped on by Ira Glass. Technically, this was a very easy piece to assemble. It's entirely aleatoric, with only beginnings and endings considered. The levels were processed by the Audacity Auto Duck plugin, just one after the other, and everything was just left to chance, and the effect turned out to be quite interesting. You'll hear my Episode Zero, and you'll hear the most recent episode of This American life, and the most recent episodes of 3 other top 20 podcasts in iTunes, and I will award a brass figlagee with bronze oak leaf palm to the person who can name the other three shows featured herein. Enjoy. Or don't. It doesn't matter. Nobody's listening anyway, not in the grand sense.