CLR · TRANSMISSION 000 ARCHIVE ONLINE SIG / NOISE 47.2 dB TAPE TEMP 21.4° C 04 · 28 · MMXXVI
Center for Listening Research a Zabriskie division · Pittsburgh, PA
EST. MMXXVI · PITTSBURGH · ACTIVE RESEARCH

Working
notes
on the jam.

We're building tools to measure how a recorded jam moves through key, chord, drone, and texture. Early days. The corpus is small on purpose; the goal is to figure out what to measure and why, then say so out loud. Dispatches are case notes from that work. Not a guide to the “best” jams, not a leaderboard, not a catalog.

Read the Case Notes Meet the Researchers
01 // PERSONNEL

Resident Researchers

One PhD. One goose. Several thousand hours of tape.
Christopher Meiklejohn CLR-001
RESEARCHER · CLR-001

Christopher Meiklejohn

Director · Improvisation, Setlist Topology & Tape Archaeology

PhD, Software Engineering. Runs the Center single-handed (well, almost. See CLR-002). Corpus on a stack of second-hand drives in a closet next to the dehumidifier; methods on a whiteboard above it. Believes a setlist is just a graph that's been very rude to its labels. Also writes at christophermeiklejohn.com.

Software Engineering DSP Tapes since '94
CLR-002
LISTENER-IN-RESIDENCE · CLR-002

Goose

Quality Control · Drive Warmth · Critical Honking

A goose. Yes, that goose. Sleeps on the warm drives. Has never honked at a Type I. Has honked at, among others, the 1995-12-29 Worcester Bathtub Gin and the 2026-04-24 I Would Die 4 U. We are not making this up. The band has asked about the naming overlap. We have no comment.

Resident · est. 2024 Reliable on BTG Cannot be reached by email
02 // DISPATCHES

From the Notebook

Case notes from a small research lab. Method development, one performance at a time. Not a survey, not a ranking.
03 // LISTEN WITH US

Active listening assignments

We build measurements that try to detect Type II improvisation. The metrics are just numbers; we need careful listeners to check them. Sign up with an invite code to participate.

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No invite code? Email zabriskieapp@gmail.com with a sentence on what you listen to.

04 // ON DECK

Songs we're investigating

Performances queued for closer review. Hit play to follow along; a dispatch lands when one of these tells us something.
Goose · Pittsburgh · 2025-06-24

What's Going Through Your Mind

Forty-two minutes. The aggregate metric reads it as Type I; a per-window pass tells a different story. The case that pushed us from full-jam means to per-window aggregation.

Phish · Great Woods · 2024-07-21

Tweezer

21:48. The strongest match outside our reference set on three of our four detectors. The chord chain caught it as a partial; the new candidate metric promotes it. Closer listen pending.

Goose · 2026-04-24

I Would Die 4 U

A Prince cover. Five and a half minutes pegged at the harmonic-distance ceiling. The algorithm flagged it strongly; the framing for what kind of Type II this is is being reworked. Closer listen pending.

05 // ON THE BENCH

A small sample, on purpose.

This isn't the full Phish or Goose catalog. It's a curated bench of performances we've hand-picked for method development: community-flagged Type IIs, songs with multiple comparable versions, and a rolling slice of recent shows. Phish has played 2,000+ shows; Goose, several hundred. We ingest selectively because every metric needs to be built and argued about one performance at a time.

128perfs
In the working sample · 1992 to 2026
24songs
Across 3 bands · for cross-version comparison
1PhD
+ 1 goose, in a basement, in Pittsburgh
1filed
Dispatches published · more in development

“Treat each dispatch as a worked example, not a verdict. The point is to develop the vocabulary (what a measurement means, where it fails, what it misses) by arguing about a small number of recordings in detail. The catalog comes later, if it comes at all.”

FOUNDING MEMO · CLR · MMXXVI