You Are Listening To is an amazing free website that lets you enjoy ambient music mashed up with live police radio broadcasts. It’s a unique web based service that overlays calm music with live radio broadcasts from law enforcement agencies. You Are Listening To selects some of the best relaxing tunes from SoundCloud, one of the largest online audio distribution platforms out there, which are then combined with live police radio broadcasts for your streaming pleasure. It has a lot of cities (e.g. Atlanta, Baltimore, Phoenix, San Francisco and Wichita) whose local police radio scanner or air traffic control feeds you can choose to stream online and based on that, it can even display images or bird’s eye videos (presumably recorded via Police Choppers) of the city at night. Apart from that, you can also create your own custom page by choosing the scanner feed and SoundCloud playlist, which can be then directly shared with others over popular social networks.
How To Enjoy Ambient Music Mashed Up With Live Police Radio Broadcasts?
When it comes to using You Are Listening To, things are extremely easy. There are no signups, accounts or anything of that sort required. All you have to do is head over to the website and start streaming. Here’s how the homepage looks like:
As illustrated by the above screenshot, You Are Listening To features a pretty busy (and honestly, a bit confusing too!) home page, filled with all sorts of stuff everywhere. The major part of the homepage consists of either a static picture or a live playing bird’s eye video of the city (based on the selected city, with Los Angeles being the default) in the background. Other UI elements appear as auto-hiding slide out panes. The left pane features the currently playing SoundCloud track widget (with controls), along with live tweets shared by other listeners. On the other hand, the right pane consists of a list of all the cities whose police radio scanner feeds are available for selection. It also has a column where you can listen to custom feeds (LAX, NASA, NY Times etc.), as well as build your own page. Other than that, there’s just a simple header that shows the name of the city whose mashup you’re listening to on the left, with the right having navigational and music controls. Simple, isn’t it?
How To Create Your Own Police Scanner/Ambient Music Mashup Page?
The best thing about You Are Listening To is that you can create your own custom Police Scanner/Ambient Music mashup page, complete with all kinds of customizations. You can specify the SoundCloud tracks to stream, YouTube video to play in the background, as well as select which city’s police scanner feed you’d like to overlay with the songs of your choice. Doing so is extremely simple. Here’s how to get started:
On the right pane (to bring it up, use the List icon on the header), click on the Build Your Own link. You should see something like this in the right pane:
As illustrated by the above screenshot, building your own custom page is a matter of seconds. All you have to do is specify the details, such as the SoundCloud playlist, police scanner or ATC stream, YouTube videos and background image. Once done, simply hit the Apply Your Settings button, and the page will be created. You can even use the social sharing icons to directly share the created page with others over multiple social networks. How cool is that?
Conclusion
You Are Listening To is an incredible free website that lets you enjoy ambient music mashed up with live police radio broadcasts. It mixes up two totally different kinds of audio sources to create a one of a kind, surreal environment that’s just too awesome to be described in words. Listening to relaxing tunes with police sirens and radio chatter in the background creates a whole different ambience. Add to it the fact that you can create your own custom page, and this thing becomes even better. Do give it a try, and I’m pretty sure you’ll be hooked.
