TL;DR
- Bop Spotter uses Spotify to monitor what is played on public roads.
- The solar energy project has been running 24/7, posting a track record on its website.
What do you get when you combine a old android smartphoneShazam, a solar panel and a street pole? If you said “this week’s hottest social experiment,” you might be right.
Developer Riley Walz has come up with a project he calls Bop Watcher. Deep in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, Walz has deployed his Bop Spotter hardware to listen to the vibrant soundscape generated by the community and try to identify what you are listening to. You’ve set up an Android phone to perpetually recharge with a solar panel, and its only other task is to run Spotify 24 hours a day to recognize the tunes emanating from passing cars, boomboxes, and maybe even some street performers. particularly talented.
Walz describes Bop Spotter as a tool for tapping into the tastes of a community:
This is cultural surveillance. Nobody notices, nobody consents. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about capturing vibrations. A constant feed of what is happening in real time.
Your hardware transmits the songs it has detected Walz websitewhere you can keep track of what you listen to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are even some helpful Spotify and Apple Music links so you can listen to their discoveries for yourself (what, no YouTube love?).
Walz talks about finding inspiration in ShotSpotter’s technology, which also uses microphones on street poles, except to locate gunshots in participating cities. This one is probably much less useful to the police, but its atmosphere is definitely much calmer.
