WavePulse: Real-time Content Analytics of Radio Livestreams
Govind Mittal, Sarthak Gupta, Shruti Wagle, Chirag Chopra, Anthony J DeMattee, Nasir Memon, Mustaque Ahamad, Chinmay Hegde
2024-12-26
Summary
This paper talks about WavePulse, a new system that records, analyzes, and documents radio content in real-time, particularly focusing on its application during the 2024 Presidential Elections.
What's the problem?
Radio is still a major source of information for many people, but analyzing the vast amount of content from radio broadcasts can be challenging. Current methods often lack the ability to efficiently process and understand the large volumes of audio data available from various radio stations, especially when it comes to tracking political trends and public opinion.
What's the solution?
To address this issue, the authors developed WavePulse, which monitors and processes livestreams from 396 news radio stations over three months, resulting in nearly 500,000 hours of audio. WavePulse converts these audio streams into time-stamped transcripts and analyzes them to answer important political questions. It uses advanced AI tools to capture and analyze the content effectively, allowing researchers to see how local issues connect with national trends during a critical election period.
Why it matters?
This research is important because it provides a new way to understand public opinion and political dynamics through radio broadcasts. By analyzing real-time data from a wide range of sources, WavePulse can offer valuable insights into how information spreads and influences public attitudes, which is crucial for understanding the political landscape during elections.
Abstract
Radio remains a pervasive medium for mass information dissemination, with AM/FM stations reaching more Americans than either smartphone-based social networking or live television. Increasingly, radio broadcasts are also streamed online and accessed over the Internet. We present WavePulse, a framework that records, documents, and analyzes radio content in real-time. While our framework is generally applicable, we showcase the efficacy of WavePulse in a collaborative project with a team of political scientists focusing on the 2024 Presidential Elections. We use WavePulse to monitor livestreams of 396 news radio stations over a period of three months, processing close to 500,000 hours of audio streams. These streams were converted into time-stamped, diarized transcripts and analyzed to track answer key political science questions at both the national and state levels. Our analysis revealed how local issues interacted with national trends, providing insights into information flow. Our results demonstrate WavePulse's efficacy in capturing and analyzing content from radio livestreams sourced from the Web. Code and dataset can be accessed at https://wave-pulse.io.