Supreme Court Clouds (2014)
Here’s a supercut of audio from April 22, 2014’s Supreme Court argument in ABC v. Aereo featuring every use (in order) of the word “cloud.” The video track is from Cory Arcangel’s “Super Mario Clouds” (2002).
Here’s a version of the audio only (yes, I put my cloud sound on SoundCloud):
How I made this
The Supreme Court makes transcripts of its oral arguments available on the day of the argument, and puts up audio the Friday after. I edited the audio in Audacity, and the transcript is indexed, so I had a list of all the uses of the word “cloud” that I could check off as I went.
Once I had the audio, I grabbed a copy of Cory Arcangel’s video and used mencoder to put them together. The commands I used to add the audio was:
mencoder -ovc copy -audiofile supremecourtclouds.mp3 -oac copy supermarioclouds.mp4 -o supremecourtclouds-unclipped.mp4
And to clip the video to the length of the audio, I did:
mencoder -endpos 00:00:56 -ovc copy -oac copy supremecourtclouds-unclipped.mp4 -o supremecourtclouds.mp4
Attending oral arguments on Tuesday was a great experience. Glad I’ve got this little memento.