Colin Fahey's 2002 July 4th KUCI Broadcast



On July 4th, 2002, around noon, I visited KUCI, a radio station (88.9 FM) located at the University of California, Irvine campus, to be a DJ for an hour (12-1 PM).


FIGURE: KUCI: DJ for the program "The Kids are Alright".


FIGURE: KUCI: Set-up for a special 5-hour July 4th experimental music event.


FIGURE: KUCI: Wall with painting and notes.


FIGURE: KUCI: Set-up for a special 5-hour July 4th experimental music event.


FIGURE: KUCI: Lounge-like environment in main room of station.



AN OPPORTUNITY TO BE A GUEST DJ

AT KUCI


I have listened to KUCI, with varying devotion, ever since I arrived in California to attend graduate school at UCI back in 1993. I really liked their diverse programs. I remember passing by the KUCI station on UCI's "outer ring road" in the mid-1990's, and sometimes DJ's would bring equipment outside the station to do "live" mixing of music on the front lawn of their building. That was so cool. The station moved to a new location on campus and got a new transmitter. KUCI is also "broadcasting" live on the Internet (streaming audio) at the www.kuci.org WWW site.

On May 13th, 2002, I happened to listen to KUCI during their pledge drive. A pair of DJ's were talking about various premiums for different pledge levels. For example, for something like $30 you could get a bunch of music CD's or concert tickets! But then one of the DJ's mentioned in passing that for a $200 pledge you could be a "DJ for an hour". What?! Holy Toledo! I grabbed the phone and called the station. Sure enough, it was true. Within five minutes of committing to a pledge of $200 on the phone, I had a check in the local mailbox. Wow, I was going to be a DJ!!!

For a couple of weeks I was busy with work, but in early June I decided that I wanted to be a DJ sometime soon, on a day with some significance, like July 4th. I started to put a playlist together, listening to CD's in my collection to try and build up a list of songs that would be cool to play. It was always my plan to burn an audio CD with all songs I intended to feature in my show -- so playing all of the songs would not require any technical effort (like switching CD's) when I was "on the air".

I gave two of my friends (Sam and Greg) an initial version of my music CD. Sam's opinion was that the middle of the CD was a bit slow. I listened to the CD again and again, and I knew I could do better. I also decided that I wanted to record audio for the actual DJ announcements, mostly because I wanted to have complex sound effects with the dialog -- which might be difficult or impossible to get right in "real time" when broadcasting "live".



CREATION OF THE "DJ HACKER AI" CHARACTER


I came up with a persona, "DJ Hacker AI", to be my on-air personality. The premise was this: "DJ Hacker AI" was not a human being, but instead was an Artifical Intelligence (AI) in cyberspace -- and this AI has an interest in being a DJ. Furthermore, "DJ Hacker AI" is a hacker, and thus hacks in to the KUCI broadcast to practice its DJ skills. The threat facing DJ Hacker AI was that KUCI's "cyberspace defense grid" would detect the hack during the broadcast, and KUCI's "Black Ice" would blast DJ Hacker AI in to a Terra-Byte of virtual debris.

I created a new audio CD with my new "show" concept. I gave a copy to my friend Sam. He liked the playlist changes, and he liked the dialog, but he thought the dialog was a little bit confusing. I didn't think it was confusing, but it doesn't matter what *I* think! Also, if Sam thought it was a little confusing, it would definitely confuse the average listener.

So I made some new decisions: (1) I'd make the dialog very explicit about everything, so that listeners would have no trouble comprehending the story; (3) I was going to make the voice more artificial to make it clear that "DJ Hacker AI" is not a human being; (2) I was going to try harder to make certain aspects of the "DJ Hacker AI" character fit a personality profile ("DJ Hacker AI" has TWO personalities, "Left Brain" and "Right Brain", which you hear from the left and right stereo speakers, respectively. By default, we hear a single voice from both speakers.).

July 4th was then only a few days away, but I decided that I wanted to make the artificial voice by taking individual recordings of words spoken in my voice ("A", "An", "And", ...) and writing a computer program to merge these words in to the final dialog -- just like a voicemail system, answering machine, or talking clock or wristwatch puts words together to form its sentences.

My "DJ Hacker AI" dialog (in a text file) had roughly 525 words total, but there were only 245 UNIQUE words. Speaking in to a microphone and recording all of the dialog, followed by careful hand-extraction of audio clips corresponding to individual words would have been tedious. I wrote a computer program that was basically a sound recorder that would: (1) prompt me with a printed word; (2) record my spoken voice; (3) locate the beginning and end of the spoken word (ignoring background noise); (4) write out the audio to a file with the same name as the word (e.g., "acknowledged.wav").


FIGURE: My computer program to record words of dialog.


This program is pretty cool. I can open any text file, and the program will find all unique words and sort them alphabetically. Then I can use the "Previous" and "Next" buttons to choose one of the sorted unique words. If the word already has an audio file (e.g., "hello.wav"), then it is loaded and displayed. I can play the sound, or record a new version. When I record a new sound, the program automatically locates the beginning and end of the sound. But I can adjust the starting (RED) and ending (GREEN) locations with buttons -- just in case the automatic start and end location is fooled by random background noises during recording, or if I want to trim off part of the spoken word.


FIGURE: My computer program to assemble words in to dialog.


The program shown above takes a text file (such as the dialog script) and reads in all unique word audio files that will be needed to convert the text to speech. Punctuation marks (period, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, semicolon, colon, etc) are converted to specific durations of audio silence to create the proper pauses between words and sentences.

I was thrilled when I heard the final output of this process. It sounded just like me talking, but with a somewhat artificial cadence.

Here is an example of generated speech using my programs:
"I am an Artificial Intelligence" (WAV file, 178KB, Mono, 22.5 kHz)


Actually, I was a little bit worried; the voice sounded maybe too much like me talking in an ordinary way. It didn't sound artificial enough for my "DJ Hacker AI" character -- who was supposed to be an AI. People wouldn't immediately think that the voice wasn't human.

Using a sound editing program (Cool Edit Pro) I increased the tempo of the generated dialog audio by a factor of 1.5x because the original speech audio sounded too slow. Then I added a reverb effect to make it sound even more mechanical. It was tough because I wanted to increase the reverb (actually, it was a special case of the "flange" filter) effect since it sounded so cool, but then the dialog became hard to understand!

Here's an example of speech processed by special effects:
"I am an Artificial Intelligence" (WAV file, 464KB, Stereo, 44.1 kHz) (It's 1.5x faster and has extreme flanger effect applied.)

Eventually I had all of the dialog audio prepared, and I made some final changes to the song playlist, and I burned the final CD.

Here is the speech recorder application and the speech concatenation application:
Word Record and Merge (ZIP file, 521KB)




MY HOUR OF FAME AT KUCI


I listened to KUCI on the morning of July 4th. I was told that my show was going to replace the final hour of a show that normally went from 10 AM to 1 PM -- so I wanted to listen to a bit of the show just to make sure that my music didn't clash. For example, it would be weird to preempt the final hour of a Country & Western music show with cutting-edge electronic dance music! I might have cancelled my appearance if the difference in genre was too extreme. As it turns out, the DJ was playing jazz and some electronic music. The DJ, Jen Strasser, even said something like "I'll be with you, at least in spirit, until 1 PM -- but today we have a special guest DJ who will be here from 12 to 1." Yikes! This was for real!

I arrived at the KUCI station at 11:15 AM, about 45 minutes before my show. I was nervous all morning. It gradually became clear to me that putting the entire show on an audio CD was really smart! Otherwise I'd be twice as nervous!

I sat on a chair outside the station, trying to calm down. I could hear people moving around inside the station. I didn't want to knock on the door too early. I was worried that I would run out of things to talk about if I had to kill time before the show with conversation. (It turned out that this concern was totally proven wrong. I could have talked for hours with the interesting people at KUCI!)

Then it was 11:40 AM, and I finally decided to knock on the door. I had to knock again before someone answered the door.

As you can see from the photo's above, the main room inside the station looks very friendly and cozy. The walls are lined with shelves of vinyl records. (The KUCI audio CD collection is in another room.)

I sat down on a chair and the station engineer (Mike?) started a conversation with me. I could see someone in another room at a microphone, and I guessed that it was (DJ) Jen Strasser, on the air.

Mike described how he was setting up the main room of the station for a special, 5-hour "live" experimental music session that would take place later that day, starting at 5 PM. Here are some of the elements involved in the planned session: (1) A police scanner; (2) Audio from Leonard Nemoy's "In Search of..." television program on video tape; (3) Recordings of Rod Serling (creator of "Twilight Zone" television series); (4) Recordings of Winston Churchill speeches; (5) Distortion box; (6) Electric guitar; (7) Film projector; (8) Black light and little red lights scattered around the darkened room, just to create the right atmosphere.

It was so hilarious and original. I just loved the whole idea. I was really glad that people were doing this kind of thing right here in Irvine.



JEN STRASSER

(DJ AT KUCI)


Soon Jen came out to greet me. I told her that my entire program was on the CD, including a station identification announcement, and that the volume of all tracks was adjusted in advance to be uniform. I said that it should be possible to just hit the "Play" button, and 58 minutes and 34 seconds later the next KUCI show could begin!

Jen returned to the main control panel, asked for my "on air" name. I was embarrassed to tell her the name: "DJ Hacker AI". Like so many "creative" things I come up with, I get embarrassed when it is time to share it with others. Everything I ever worked on, no matter how cool I thought it was when I worked on it, suddenly becomes the most idiotic, UN-original thing in the world just when I psych myself in to presenting the idea. In that moment it seems obvious that I must have been an idiot for ever thinking that the ideas were any good. But that's when I decide that it's okay to be an idiot! Why fight it?! That's why I am able to follow through with wacky projects like this.

So Jen announced on the air: "You are in for a special treat. It is my privilege to introduce 'DJ Hacker AI'..." Then she started the CD. After looking at an analog meter for half a minute, and adjusting a volume control slider, the technical aspect of getting my show on the air was finished!

Jen was really nice. She showed me the main control board, the computer with the audio samples that they could trigger as needed (perhaps public service announcement and station identification, etc), and the phone for taking listener requests.

Jen gave me a tour of the station. It's a small building, but it is very interesting inside. Some aspects were funny and practical -- like a small radio in the bathroom so that a DJ could tell if there was "dead air" (radio silence) or other problems (like a skipping record or CD) while he or she was in the bathroom. Hilarious, yet clever and useful.

All of the CD's are cataloged in a computer, and all have identification stickers. They're sorted and stored on shelves, with sections like "RPM", "Techno", "Ambient", "Experimental", "Rock", "Jazz", "Metal", etc.

KUCI acquires CD's free of charge from record companies and independent musicians and bands that are interested in promoting their music.

A key part of the mission of KUCI is to play songs that you can't hear on any other radio stations. So, when a band becomes really big, their records get placed on "Never Play" shelves. (Jen showed me a handful of records from the band "Chicago" since they happened to be sitting directly in front of us on the "Never Play" shelves.)

I reflected for a moment on my own playlist (I mean, "DJ Hacker AI"'s playlist!), and decided that it was probably sufficiently "underground" to avoid violating the KUCI mission. Whew!

When I told Jen that I used to be a physics graduate student at UCI, she told me that she is a math graduate student at UCI, and that she was going to get a Ph.D. fairly soon. Wow! We talked about her thesis. It has to do with converging on concepts in learning, even when bombarded by different inputs that might cause conventional learning algorithms to become indecisive, oscillating between concepts. Also, her work makes certain algorithms practical for the first time -- just like the transistor (instead of vacuum tubes) made computers and consumer electronics more practical.

Eventually my CD had finished playing. The next DJ (for a program called "The Kids are Alright") was already at the control board. She played loops of music and sound effects from the classic video arcade game "Pac Man" to fill in a minute before her show was to begin. (You can see her at the microphone in one of the photo's above.)



OTHER ITEMS


KUCI Station Manager, Julie "Wanda" Espy



Julie Espy made it possible for me to be a guest DJ on KUCI during what would ordinarily be part of a regular DJ's show. Apparently guest DJ's are given a special time slot on a Sunday, contrary to the claims made during the pledge drive that you could be a "DJ for an hour" on any day and hour, just by contacting the appropriate DJ.

I felt bad that I was cutting in to someone's show. I essentially "bribed" my way on the air, after all. I apologized to Jen about this, but she was very gracious and said it was okay.

Anyhow, I am grateful to Julie for helping me prepare the content of my "show" (waiving some rules and telling me about how station identification worked). I guess she implicitly approved the playlist I sent to her via e-mail.


PLAYLIST


The following is the playlist of the songs I played during my radio show:


[1] Playlist as WWW Page.
[2] Playlist as Text File.


As it turns out, the only two people I know who listened to the show were: (1) The KUCI station manager, who listened from some remote location; (2) My friend Sam. Both people said it sounded good.

My brother Chris was on vacation, so he couldn't listen online. Some of my other relatives and friends were traveling, also. For example, my friend Greg Moulton was in Ireland! In general, my "inspired idea" to have the show on a major holiday totally backfired! Almost everybody I wanted to impress had gone to a location that is out of range of KUCI's FM broadcast, or has no medium-speed Internet access.

Still, it was fun. I was so happy that I had the chance to try something like this.

Jen mentioned the upcoming "DJ Training" session on July 17th. I could be a regular DJ. Hmmmmmm..... ;-)

--- Colin P. Fahey
cpfahey@earthlink.net