Hearsay

An archive nobody cataloguedSub-level two holds 164 recordings, and every one of them has been cut into pieces. That makes 724 unlabeled cassettes, on the shelves, on the benches, and all over the floor. There is no search. There are no titles. A tape tells you nothing until you play it. What you get is ten cabinets, each with a sign over it: Old Time, Classical, Country, Funk, Hip-Hop, Holiday, Horror, Jazz, Rock and Video Game. And a deck to play tapes on.

The Old Time cabinet holds 20 real recordings from about a hundred years ago, public domain, out of the Library of Congress. Everything else is real music by human artists, used under Creative Commons and similar licenses and credited in the game. Listen. Fill the row. Check. Every recording has its own row on a shelf, one slot per piece. Put the tapes you think belong there in the order you think they go. When the last slot fills, the row checks itself, one slot at a time.

Green means the right recording in the right place. Yellow means the right recording in the wrong place. Red means that tape does not belong in this row. Take a tape back off and the whole row goes quiet again until it is full. Get a row right on its first check and you did it by ear.A bench to be wrong onThe bench grades nothing.…