Site Combining Police Radio Traffic With Music A Big Hit

LOS ANGELES (CBS) — Angelenos are tuning into an Internet broadcast that's gritty and strangely hypnotic at the same time.

"You are listening to Los Angeles" combines a live audio stream from Los Angeles Police's scanner traffic, overlaid with ambient music. San Francisco-based digital product manager Eric Eberhardt put the site online Sunday and has gotten a huge response.

In two days, the site has gotten 40,000 page views from 37,000 unique users.

"So one thing I found really interesting about the response to the site so far... the traffic is not all coming from a few 'big' sites," Eberhardt said in a chat interview. "I think most of it is being driven from Facebook by people clicking the 'Like' button or on Twitter by people sharing the link there.

The combination of ambient music and gritty police speak has been called "hypnotic" and "mesmerizing" and been compared to movies like "Blade Runner" or "Heat", he said.

Eberhardt says he was inspired to create the site when he began listening to a live police scanner webcast the night the Giants won the World Series. After some consideration on how best to recreate his experience of listening to the scanner while listening to music, Eberhardt found an LAPD radio stream from radioreference.com and coupled it with selections of ambient music from SoundCloud.com.

Since the site has been up, there has been some discussion about whether the scanner traffic was authentic.

"People weren't sure if the police radio was 'live' so they were considering doing something that would attract police attention in order to confirm it," Eberhardt said. "But luckily I think they decided against it."

Eberhardt has registered the domain youarelistening.to and says that expanding the concept to cities like New York, Chicago and his own home base are in the works. He says he's also open to the idea of other people replicating the concept in their own cities.