Every time a WXYC DJ follows one song with another, they're making a creative decision — drawing a line between two artists that says these belong together right now. Over 22 years of freeform radio programming, WXYC DJs have made millions of these decisions, encoding an enormous map of musical relationships that exists nowhere else.
The Semantic Index mines this archive to surface those connections. It reveals an underground geography of music — not based on algorithms or popularity, but on the curatorial instincts of hundreds of DJs who've sat behind the mic at WXYC 89.3 FM, Chapel Hill's freeform radio station.
Search for any artist and explore their neighborhood — the web of artists that WXYC DJs have woven around them through two decades of programming. The connections go beyond genre: you'll find links between artists who share session musicians, record labels, compilation appearances, and stylistic DNA from Discogs metadata.
Each connection is weighted by how often and how meaningfully DJs paired those artists together, using a statistical measure called Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI). A high PMI means the pairing is deliberate, not just two popular artists showing up near each other by chance.
The result is a living document of WXYC's musical identity — a freeform station where a DJ might follow Autechre with Prince Jammy, or Duke Ellington with Jessica Pratt. These aren't random juxtapositions; they're the station's collective ear, made visible.
WXYC 89.3 FM · Chapel Hill, NC · Student-run freeform radio since 1977