KPHP is a classical radio station that broadcasts only to me. It follows the programming rules of WHRB’s afternoon concert (I was a member throughout my time at Harvard), and it reads a legal ID (“KPHP, Berkeley”) near the top of each hour. The call letters are K, for west of the Mississippi, and my initials, PHP.
The library is a discography of 42,165 recordings, and the library decides what airs; Apple Music only plays it, the way the turntable did at WHRB. Of the 26,978 works in the library, 20,015 turned out to be playable on Apple Music. Apple’s terms forbid rebroadcasting its audio, so there is no stream. Instead the station publishes a program log—a timestamped list of what plays when—and tuning in seeks my own Apple Music to the live position. Each afternoon concert also ends up in my Apple Music app as a playlist (“KPHP Afternoon Concert” and the date), since the station’s player stops once my phone’s screen locks.
The hard rules of the afternoon concert (no complete operas, nothing over two hours, no composer again too soon) are enforced in code. Claude never decides whether a piece may air. It chooses only among pieces the rules already allow, and it writes the copy between them, including sixty faux underwriting spots and thirty public service announcements.
Everything said on air is read by text-to-speech voices. A host, one of eleven who take turns by shift, announces each piece and its performers and gives the time and the legal ID: “The time is 2:12 PM, and you’re listening to KPHP, Berkeley.” A separate announcer reads the underwriting and the public service announcements, which are comedic and entirely deadpan. Support for KPHP comes from, among others, the Eastshore Credit Union for Careful People, whose make-a-list-and-check-it-twice ethos means the clerks will walk you to the door, and back to the desk, and back to the door. Another sponsor is the Kensington Hilltop Button Exchange, where buttons are traded, never sold, and each “arrives with a short written account of the coat it left”. One public service announcement is a reminder to put that plastic grocery bag you’ve stuffed in a drawer in the car so you actually use it.
Evenings carry weekly features in the house style of my WHRB scripts, a Saturday hour of historical performances, and Sunday opera. The one setting I have not settled is the familiarity of afternoon concerts, which acts as a dial from pretentious and obscurantist (0) to literally KUSC (1). At 0.75 the station sounded too popular, so each afternoon concert now draws its own familiarity between 0.30 and 0.75, and I rate the concert too familiar, about right, or too obscure before I am told which it was.