An interactive visualization of 30 years of recurring music from the iconic radio program, This American Life.
How It Works
This visualization identifies recurring music by acoustic fingerprinting all 877 episodes (1995–2025) using Chromaprint, then clustering similar clips at an 85% similarity threshold with manual curation to group related clips. Only clusters with 3 or more appearances across multiple episodes are included, which seemed like a reasonable bar for intentional reuse. Cluster names and descriptions were generated using Gemini.
Each dot represents a music clip. Click to hear it and explore where else it appears in the archive.
This is a fan project. All audio content and music selections are the creative work of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.