WavePulse: Real-time Content Analytics of Radio Livestreams
Authors: name: Govind Mittal, name: Sarthak Gupta, name: Shruti Wagle, name: Chirag Chopra, name: Anthony J DeMattee, name: Nasir Memon, name: Mustaque Ahamad, name: Chinmay Hegde

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.