Somewhere over the streets of San Francisco’s Mission, a microphone sits surveilling … for banger songs.
Bop Spotter is a project by technologist Riley Walz in which he has hidden an Android phone in a box on a pole, rigged it to be solar powered, and has set it to record audio and periodically sends it to Shazam’s API to determine which songs people are playing in public.
Walz describes it as ShotSpotter, but for music.
“This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals,” Walz’s website reads. “It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time.”
ShotSpotter, of course, is the microphone-based, “gunshot detection” surveillance company that cities around the country have spent millions of dollars on. ShotSpotter is often inaccurate, and sometimes detects things like fireworks or a car backfiring as gunshots. Chicago, one of ShotSpotter’s biggest clients, is finally allowing its contract with the company to end.
Bop Spotter, on the other hand, is designed to figure out what cool music people are blasting from their cars or as they walk down the street.
“I am a chronic Shazam-er. Most songs I listen to come from first hearing them at a party, store, or on the street,” Walz told 404 Media. “Years ago I had the thought that it’d be cool to Shazam 24/7 from a fixed location, and I recently learned about ShotSpotter, and thought it’d be amusing to do what they do with music instead of gunshots. Was a great weekend project.”
Walz said that the phone itself is rigged to a solar panel, and that it records audio in 10-minute blocks while in airplane mode. “Then it connects to WiFi to send the file to my server, which then split it into 20-second chunks that get passed to Shazam’s API. The device doesn’t Shazam directly, that would use way too much power. Probably $100 of parts,” he said.
BopSpotter’s website has a constant feed of songs it hears, as well as links to play the songs in Spotify or Apple Music. As I’m writing this, BopSpotter has picked up “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar, “The Next Episode” by Dr. Dre, and “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley (a Rick Roll already?) among dozens of songs in the last few hours. The site also has a constant feed of the device’s power levels. So far in three days, it has detected 380 songs.
“I thought the solar panel would be annoying but it provides 4 times more power than the phone needs,” Walz said. “The hardest part was scoping out which pole to actually put it up on. I had to balance finding a busy location where lots of music could be picked up, with enough sunlight, and good connection to a public wifi network.”
Walz declined to say exactly where the phone is, but said it’s in a plastic box and sent me a photo that he asked me not to publish because the location would be identifiable.
“I think it’s not hard for someone with authority to find, especially if they knew what it looked like. With all hope, it will stay up for several years!,” he said. His favorite bops thus far? “‘Just the Two of Us’ by Bill Withers and Grover Washington played Sunday at 3am. Goes so hard.”
