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Listen To Wikipedia: Engineers Translate Edits Into Sound
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We all know Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced compendium of online information. Most of the time we read Wikipedia entries, but we're about to hear an audio interpretation of those pages and how they are edited. This comes to us courtesy of our friends at The World According To Sound. It's a podcast by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. Take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SOUND")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: This is the sound of Wikipedia being edited.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: It's a project made by Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi. They wrote a program that turns every edit of a Wikipedia entry into a sound. Whenever someone adds information, you hear a bell, and when they delete something, you hear a string plucked.
And the pitch reflects the size of the edits, the lower the note, the larger the edit. There are several edits every second on Wikipedia, thousands every hour. You can hear and see them all in real time at listen.hatnote.com.
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(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: The World According to Sound is a podcast created by Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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