This kind of project has made me realize that somewhere along the way, I quit thinking of tech as a way to build anything fun. I need to rekindle that goofball spirit.
I've definitely noticed the same in my career. Its easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget some of the reasons you got started doing all this in the first place (in my case, because its fun and/or I'm passionate about software/hardware).
On a whim, I decided to invest time in writing down one idea per week of anything fun I could hack on. It doesn't really matter whether or not I go through with it, I keep the stakes low: just write an idea down. That way it forces me to think about things I could build for myself or others/friends/family without much cognitive investment.
The end result has not only had a nonzero impact on my motivation to start new projects, it has impacted my ability to actually follow through. And I've noticed the practice has made the ideation loop happen more frequently than once per week over time.
Google added this optional feature to pixel lock screens a few years back. You can 'heart' songs and it adds them you your playlist. It looks like my phone ID's about 300 songs a month!
The Mission is a variegated place. It's been undergoing gentrification for 4 decades but it never seems to get there - so much so that you could say that that's become its "thing."
The exact location where the phone is placed makes a huge difference. Going from Valencia to Shotwell to the BART plazas to the Latino bars and back to the hills your soundtrack would change quite a few times.
Where does gentrification begin and end? The mission went from Ohlone to Spanish to German/Irish/Italian immigrants, then Mexican immigrants, then Central American, then LGBT, then wider punks/misfits and other immigrants including Filipinos, before the techies started moving in. I don’t really understand this term because it seems to suggest before a richer class moves into an area it displaces “the true inhabitants,” but those true inhabitants have almost always displaced someone else.
I bet the hardware will take a bit more - the script could be just something like https://github.com/loiccoyle/shazam-cli running every minute and, when there's a valid result, upload to your backend/Sheets API/Telegram bot etc
It might be that you’re the asshole in this situation. I think the boundaries are pourous around this topic.
(Sure, I just called someone random on the web an asshole. I don’t mean it with any force. In London we get people riding busses playing their im-personal stereos loudly, sometimes. I often don’t like it either. I often use headphones for my own sounds but not the blocking kind, and will have to stop my music because of thwirs. One time someone got into the Tube/metro carriage I was in playing loud Brazilian music from a speaker on a trolley. At first it annoyed me, but after a few bars it got me grooving. Then I realised it was a funk-infused cover of a traditional capoeira song, so I steuck up a conversation with the other rider about Brazil and capoeira. Made my day.)
Other cultures seem to feel more entitled, thinking that THEIR music could not possibly bother anyone. I've certainly heard people blast Wagner or Orff at high volumes.
The phrase "turn down" is the opposite of "turn up". To "turn down" would be to decrease the intensity of the party. And "turn down for what" means something like "don't stop the party for any reason".
Pretty sure that's not the case here. To "turn down" is a common phrase (at least in the US) that is used to describe changing something by use of a control.
As described at Wiktionary [0] - it's an idiomatic way of saying that you're going to lower the volume through use of a control to do that. The context that was used has nothing to do with party.
> At its core, turn down for what is a phrase used to promote having a good time. The phrase itself implies that there is no reason to turn down and stop partying.
Highly variable of course - but I've found these types of self-centered narcissistic attributes to be far more endemic to western culture. I don't remember a single time in my years of living in Taiwan where I heard somebody blaring loud music / subwoofers, both while walking around and in all the flats that I lived.
This is really cool. Imagine a map of this across a city, being able to see what different areas tend to listen to. I imagine you'd find some surprising and not-so-surprising things.
And music fingerprinting is probably incredibly accurate, because it can work similar to linguistic fingerprinting.
There was a site posted to this place a year or so ago, which looked at work frequencies to find alt-accounts.
I don't hide the fact that I use a different account on different computers, so I have a personal account and work accounts and end up changing accounts each time I change jobs.
This site correlated all my accounts, using a very basic fingerprinting technique of looking for words which a user uses uncommonly often.
It found them all with a good degree of confidence.
I haven't seen reference to that site since, I suspect it got taken down.
Musical fingerprinting would be accurate to a similar degree. You wouldn't look for the music someone listens to most, you'd look for uncommon combinations.
A combination a just a few songs that someone listens to unusually more than other people is probably enough for a good enough correlation for fingerprinting.
Leaking 33 bits over time, especially a lifetime, is nearly impossible to avoid.
Although it's more difficult, it's also possible to be too "middle of the road": very few individuals are very close to the population average in all dimensions.
(Heinrich Böll's At the Bridge is a great short story; Böll had worked in a statistics department so he was probably well aware of the weakness in his protagonist's reasoning)
About the best I'd ask for is that custodes should ipsos be as correlatable as we all are: the amphiopticon?
Thank for finding that, yes that's the one. It was incredibly accurate.
I'm in two minds about the fact it's down.
1. It's probably a good thing that it isn't super-easy to quickly find everyone's alternate accounts.
2. The capability is clearly there and the technology is out there, but now in the hands of the few people who bother to re-implement it.
It was a useful tool for highlighting the naivety of believing that throwaway accounts were a real possibility when stylometry analysis is so relatively cheap to do.
I just gave up on ever being able to really be anonymous, after I had a rather sobering interaction with Disqus.
I had never used it, and wanted to leave a comment on a site (long ago -can't remember where or when).
I started to sign up for Disqus, and it helpfully asked me "We found all these comments from around the Web. Should we associate these with this account?"
It included some old, dead-and-gone-I-would-have-sworn-it troll postings that I had pooped out, back in the last century.
I immediately deleted my signup, and went and had a lie-down.
These days, I deliberately make it obvious who I am, and post as if I had to stand behind my words.
Absolutely. I'm not against anonymity, but am rather cynical about it, and appreciate the freedom (I have lived in nightmare totalitarian countries, and my father was in the CIA).
I recommend you sit this one out, as recording people, even if only audio and sending the sound over the internet is very much against the law in germany
The music fingerprinting on my Android phone works in airplane mode, so it would be possible with modifications. Also, it's likely that Shazam is sending a "hash" of the audio rather than an audio stream in most cases.
Ctrl-F in that document for 'hashing'. That step reduces the audio information to a sparse collection of key points, one for each of four frequency ranges per time segment. I would assume that everything up to that step is done on the phone and only the key points are sent to the server.
Thinking this through more deeply, I agree and see your position. It is creepy to surveil audio and possibly send in full to Shazam. [edit: And post the original audio recordings online.] The ethical way to do this would be to use your own code to decimate the audio signal to extremely low dimensionality.
Well it's you a person who is recording the music. So it's the user's responsibility to make sure you are not breaking any laws. So the app cannot be held at fault for this. No one cares if you do a Shazam in public so it all just works out.
But if you set up an autonomous recording device, no matter what you say you are doing, you will have problems.
Shazam is not illegal in Germany unless I missremember what the app does and instead of being to identify songs based on samples, it's being used to record people
The music industry has a long, long history of people paying to put songs in prominent places. If you built it yourself you would be 100% confident that nobody was paying the person compiling the playlist to put songs on it.
Well, at least at first. If your playlist derived from the ambient music of a particular streetcorner in Berlin becomes popular enough, someone would probably try hanging out there blasting their new song 24/7. Someone else might try approaching you about working out a deal to pay you to slip their new song into the mix. And of course you can never know who's paying to put songs on whatever stations or playlists the locals are listening to.
Some pretty interesting things would probably happen as the result of your goofy little fun project getting big enough to start having these problems though.
What more could one possibly need than "it'd be fun to build"? Does everything in the world have to be novel and important? Or can some things just be cool and for fun?
Pretty sure Apple and Google already do this, just to all phones, in all homes, and not just for music, but your entire life! No consent needed. Have a nice day! :)
Comments like this worry me that HN is being dragged down with the wider culture wars and truthiness that’s destroying all that we have. I would hope for better in this forum.
How is the OP right? Huge claims require huge evidence; this trope has been disproven over and over again. Security researchers look at exactly this kind of thing, and nevermind this community is full of the people who would actually build such a thing. A massive dragnet isn’t actually as valuable as you think it would be.
Nice. there's a selection bias as the people who play music loud enough to be heard from their cars and several genres there just don't overlap at all.
if we're acknowledging that the music played from cars is neighbourhood vibe, it raises the question of whether they are interfering with the neighbourhood as well.
I was on the ground in SF yesterday and this caught a pro-Trump car convoy blasting God Bless America yesterday so it definitely can work if cars are blasting music. Certainly an interesting project.
I was wondering the same. Also curious about those battery stats:
> Battery currently at 80% (a decrease of 6% in the last 4 hours).
That's gotta be an OLED screen at lowest brightness or, even more likely, a fully black overlay app since the mic is constantly active and either locally processing it into Shazam and streaming fingerprints or (less cpu, more network) streaming it to a server which then does the processing and queries Shazam. As a comparison, my work phone is off+idle basically the whole time and takes twice as long to charge at a higher wattage as my personal phone (i.e.: large battery by my standards), and that uses nearly a percent per hour while the screen is off with maybe 20 messages and one email coming in across 4 hours.
I'm amazed by the idea, that no rate limit has kicked in on Shazam, that they didn't connect it to a power source, and that the battery is lasting so long!
Edit: missed that it is being powered by a solar panel
I was going to complain that it had a non-duplicate constraint.. but then I realized you could remove from the other end and have a managed pubsub queue, nice.
Good effort if that's what it is (I confess, I haven't looped back to check).
Sharing for people to check is useful to bed something in, I'm not fond of the "privacy violation" but I grew up in small communities .. if you said anything within earshot in a public area it went around town faster than 10 gigabit fibre, and that was before WWW, before even TCP or the IP it sat on.
Accessible storage and replay forever is a whole level up, but these are the days in which face recognition is being rolled out to giant billboards that can display different images to different positions and track several moving pedtrasians with targeted ads based on their preferences.
See I’m not sure that it is legal. If they are re-transmitting audio is being played in public over the Internet for potentially many thousands more people, I’m pretty sure the RIAA, the UMG, & the WMG would all have something to say about it.
Ex Shazam tech here. The signatures that the Shazam app sends are very small, so bandwith costs should be minimal. Of course, I speaking about the technology of my day 2001+, so times may have changed
I've learned when setting up a family plan that depending on how many devices you already have (my wife and I each had 1 phone and 1 apple watch) we could get an extra line with unlimited data for functionally nothing. (The sim's sitting in my dashcam right now, been silently plugging away for months)
Some phone plans like Google Fi will give you a data only sim card for free. It ends up being totally free as long as you have unlimited data plans. I use my old phone and a data only sim card for random projects.
I did some measurements on shazam and it seems to send about 7kb/minute, which corresponds to 300MB/month, i.e. no big deal. I suppose it helps that shazam was designed in the age of expensive bandwidth.
> For anyone who doesn't know, 'bop' to gen Z is a derogatory term for a sexually active woman, it basically means 'slut'.
I have never heard this and I'm "Gen Z". I looked at Urban Dictionary and the earliest definition that says slut goes back to 2005, so "Gen Z" definitely didn't come up with it.
We used "bopping around" as a term to describe a sexually confident woman enjoying herself on the scene, as a generally positive term, at least since 2015, so I'm not sure it's a zoomer thing. Did it become a derogatory term? As we used it it was explicitly in opposition to "slut," it was a word of empowerment. Like yeah she gets laid good for her.
I've spent a few more minutes than I should have trying to work this out. The only way I can figure this is it's related to the head movement? Still not sure. I sure do have very little love for this generation though
This kind of project has made me realize that somewhere along the way, I quit thinking of tech as a way to build anything fun. I need to rekindle that goofball spirit.
I've definitely noticed the same in my career. Its easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and forget some of the reasons you got started doing all this in the first place (in my case, because its fun and/or I'm passionate about software/hardware).
On a whim, I decided to invest time in writing down one idea per week of anything fun I could hack on. It doesn't really matter whether or not I go through with it, I keep the stakes low: just write an idea down. That way it forces me to think about things I could build for myself or others/friends/family without much cognitive investment.
The end result has not only had a nonzero impact on my motivation to start new projects, it has impacted my ability to actually follow through. And I've noticed the practice has made the ideation loop happen more frequently than once per week over time.
I read this post every few months to keep that spirit
https://justforfunnoreally.dev/
100% - after I left my last startup I was in that frame; I did recurse.com and it really helped rekindle that spirit.
Rekindle it! Intrinsic curiosity…
I played, more than once, a few of the sound snippets. I think the Shazam "findings" are highly inaccurate. Fun project nonetheless!
walz, could you write more about the setup, maybe to propitiate others to replicate it in other cities?
Same, although I know Shazam does most of its work on very high frequencies so it’s possible we’re not able to hear the part that got matched.
The “Not Like Us” snippet (09/29 2:43pm) is easily recognizable though. And “Rockabye” can be heard at 3:05pm.
Google added this optional feature to pixel lock screens a few years back. You can 'heart' songs and it adds them you your playlist. It looks like my phone ID's about 300 songs a month!
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/7535326?hl=en
Alright, who wants to go wardriving around the mission with me, blasting Never Gonna Give You Up?
I suppose this would be "Rickdriving"?
I think this is just literal rickrolling.
They see rickrollin, they hatin, patrollin and tryin'a catch the Bop Spotter.
Ridin' Qwerty
Rickrollin on dubs?
The Mission is a variegated place. It's been undergoing gentrification for 4 decades but it never seems to get there - so much so that you could say that that's become its "thing."
The exact location where the phone is placed makes a huge difference. Going from Valencia to Shotwell to the BART plazas to the Latino bars and back to the hills your soundtrack would change quite a few times.
Where does gentrification begin and end? The mission went from Ohlone to Spanish to German/Irish/Italian immigrants, then Mexican immigrants, then Central American, then LGBT, then wider punks/misfits and other immigrants including Filipinos, before the techies started moving in. I don’t really understand this term because it seems to suggest before a richer class moves into an area it displaces “the true inhabitants,” but those true inhabitants have almost always displaced someone else.
Love that - thought about sharing your source for any of us interested in doing this in our city? Fund idea
I bet the hardware will take a bit more - the script could be just something like https://github.com/loiccoyle/shazam-cli running every minute and, when there's a valid result, upload to your backend/Sheets API/Telegram bot etc
I think this is really cool, and am surprised by some of the negative comments here
> But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes.
Love this so much.
I guess it will mostly reflect the musical taste of assholes who turn their music up loud. Hmm, but maybe all culture works like that.
It might reflect different attitudes between cultures as to what volume makes one an "asshole".
Any volume which makes your music become my music too without my consent is at asshole level.
It might be that you’re the asshole in this situation. I think the boundaries are pourous around this topic.
(Sure, I just called someone random on the web an asshole. I don’t mean it with any force. In London we get people riding busses playing their im-personal stereos loudly, sometimes. I often don’t like it either. I often use headphones for my own sounds but not the blocking kind, and will have to stop my music because of thwirs. One time someone got into the Tube/metro carriage I was in playing loud Brazilian music from a speaker on a trolley. At first it annoyed me, but after a few bars it got me grooving. Then I realised it was a funk-infused cover of a traditional capoeira song, so I steuck up a conversation with the other rider about Brazil and capoeira. Made my day.)
Have you considered those who are hard of hearing? Should they be made to drive their vehicles in silence?
I guess no one with loud music considers themself an asshole, so this should be actually giving the information on exactly what you mention.
There are examples in several cultures of songs that boast of annoying others:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMUDVMiITOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_IWlPHMziU
Other cultures seem to feel more entitled, thinking that THEIR music could not possibly bother anyone. I've certainly heard people blast Wagner or Orff at high volumes.
“turn down” isn’t about the volume of the music btw.
Interesting! What is it about, then?
The phrase "turn down" is the opposite of "turn up". To "turn down" would be to decrease the intensity of the party. And "turn down for what" means something like "don't stop the party for any reason".
Pretty sure that's not the case here. To "turn down" is a common phrase (at least in the US) that is used to describe changing something by use of a control.
As described at Wiktionary [0] - it's an idiomatic way of saying that you're going to lower the volume through use of a control to do that. The context that was used has nothing to do with party.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/turn_down
EDIT: My bad, thought it was in response to...
> I guess it will mostly reflect the musical taste of assholes who turn their music up loud. Hmm, but maybe all culture works like that.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/turn-down-for-what/
> At its core, turn down for what is a phrase used to promote having a good time. The phrase itself implies that there is no reason to turn down and stop partying.
I bet you are just the type of square who thinks that U+1F346 represents an eggplant.
No, the above poster is talking about the Lil Jon song called "Turn down for what" and it's not about volume.
I had a collogue who installed his speaker setup facing backwards out of his trunk. He knew what he was doing.
I know it's a typo, and I make typos all the time, but this one should be elevated to the "new word" status
A collogue:
Someone who sees their role on the team as to annoys others.
That’s just how you install a subwoofer though?
Highly variable of course - but I've found these types of self-centered narcissistic attributes to be far more endemic to western culture. I don't remember a single time in my years of living in Taiwan where I heard somebody blaring loud music / subwoofers, both while walking around and in all the flats that I lived.
Is the global south part of western culture?
What a cool project! What fun!
I'm curious, is there a hardcoded delay, or does the delay reflect the amount of time it takes to process what's playing and update the website?
Probably a random delay to avoid being located
This is really cool. Imagine a map of this across a city, being able to see what different areas tend to listen to. I imagine you'd find some surprising and not-so-surprising things.
Like where's the Yacht-Rock district and is Trap-House actually played near any trap houses, etc?
Then you'd get someone taking the trouble to correlate music and times, to capture someone moving across the city on the map.
Then you'd get profiling to potentially pick out who in particular moved across the city and the exact time of path of their movement.
While this is a nice idea on a local scale, when scaled up it has horrendous privacy implications.
And music fingerprinting is probably incredibly accurate, because it can work similar to linguistic fingerprinting.
There was a site posted to this place a year or so ago, which looked at work frequencies to find alt-accounts.
I don't hide the fact that I use a different account on different computers, so I have a personal account and work accounts and end up changing accounts each time I change jobs.
This site correlated all my accounts, using a very basic fingerprinting technique of looking for words which a user uses uncommonly often.
It found them all with a good degree of confidence.
I haven't seen reference to that site since, I suspect it got taken down.
Musical fingerprinting would be accurate to a similar degree. You wouldn't look for the music someone listens to most, you'd look for uncommon combinations.
A combination a just a few songs that someone listens to unusually more than other people is probably enough for a good enough correlation for fingerprinting.
Leaking 33 bits over time, especially a lifetime, is nearly impossible to avoid.
Although it's more difficult, it's also possible to be too "middle of the road": very few individuals are very close to the population average in all dimensions.
(Heinrich Böll's At the Bridge is a great short story; Böll had worked in a statistics department so he was probably well aware of the weakness in his protagonist's reasoning)
About the best I'd ask for is that custodes should ipsos be as correlatable as we all are: the amphiopticon?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ7skMnxly0
I enjoyed playing with that webapp [0], bummer that it's down now.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
Thank for finding that, yes that's the one. It was incredibly accurate.
I'm in two minds about the fact it's down.
1. It's probably a good thing that it isn't super-easy to quickly find everyone's alternate accounts.
2. The capability is clearly there and the technology is out there, but now in the hands of the few people who bother to re-implement it.
It was a useful tool for highlighting the naivety of believing that throwaway accounts were a real possibility when stylometry analysis is so relatively cheap to do.
I just gave up on ever being able to really be anonymous, after I had a rather sobering interaction with Disqus.
I had never used it, and wanted to leave a comment on a site (long ago -can't remember where or when).
I started to sign up for Disqus, and it helpfully asked me "We found all these comments from around the Web. Should we associate these with this account?"
It included some old, dead-and-gone-I-would-have-sworn-it troll postings that I had pooped out, back in the last century.
I immediately deleted my signup, and went and had a lie-down.
These days, I deliberately make it obvious who I am, and post as if I had to stand behind my words.
I do the same, but I recognise that being able to stand up and be recognised is a freedom and privilege not enjoyed by everyone.
Absolutely. I'm not against anonymity, but am rather cynical about it, and appreciate the freedom (I have lived in nightmare totalitarian countries, and my father was in the CIA).
Then you'd get someone taking the trouble to correlate music and times, to capture someone moving across the city on the map.
Only if someone can move across the city in three minutes.
How do I join the party? Is there a quickstart so you can hear the vibes of Berlin?
[edit: It would be awesome if others could collaborate on this and had a guide on how to do it!]
I recommend you sit this one out, as recording people, even if only audio and sending the sound over the internet is very much against the law in germany
The music fingerprinting on my Android phone works in airplane mode, so it would be possible with modifications. Also, it's likely that Shazam is sending a "hash" of the audio rather than an audio stream in most cases.
Its not a hash though? Its a reverse - fourier transform system that matches the sound- similar to the filter that filters out the vuvuzelas?
https://www.dechicchis.com/assets/Joseph-DeChicchis-Music-Id...
Like having a distinctive click impulse and get the cathedral from that.
Ctrl-F in that document for 'hashing'. That step reduces the audio information to a sparse collection of key points, one for each of four frequency ranges per time segment. I would assume that everything up to that step is done on the phone and only the key points are sent to the server.
European law tends not to like "clever" workarounds. IANAL but I belive you would still be practicing illegal surveillance.
Which law are you thinking about in particular?
I expectation is that the microphone above the rooftop will not pick up on normal conversations, only louder stuff.
Thinking this through more deeply, I agree and see your position. It is creepy to surveil audio and possibly send in full to Shazam. [edit: And post the original audio recordings online.] The ethical way to do this would be to use your own code to decimate the audio signal to extremely low dimensionality.
You misunderstand how Shazam works. Nothing is “sent in full”.
Would that not mean that Shazaam is illegal Germany? From my limited searching it doesn't seem like it is.
Well it's you a person who is recording the music. So it's the user's responsibility to make sure you are not breaking any laws. So the app cannot be held at fault for this. No one cares if you do a Shazam in public so it all just works out.
But if you set up an autonomous recording device, no matter what you say you are doing, you will have problems.
What law is that that's broken here?
Shazam is not illegal in Germany unless I missremember what the app does and instead of being to identify songs based on samples, it's being used to record people
Recording conversations are illegal but if you could prevent that from happening, there is enough wiggle room that it has the potential to be legal.
Especially on a Sunday
Other than "it'd be fun to build", what would it bring to the table in comparison to say this Apple Music playlist? https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-25-berlin/pl.184d798...
The music industry has a long, long history of people paying to put songs in prominent places. If you built it yourself you would be 100% confident that nobody was paying the person compiling the playlist to put songs on it.
Well, at least at first. If your playlist derived from the ambient music of a particular streetcorner in Berlin becomes popular enough, someone would probably try hanging out there blasting their new song 24/7. Someone else might try approaching you about working out a deal to pay you to slip their new song into the mix. And of course you can never know who's paying to put songs on whatever stations or playlists the locals are listening to.
Some pretty interesting things would probably happen as the result of your goofy little fun project getting big enough to start having these problems though.
What more could one possibly need than "it'd be fun to build"? Does everything in the world have to be novel and important? Or can some things just be cool and for fun?
AWESOME project. thank you for the inspiration! and the hope!
Pretty sure Apple and Google already do this, just to all phones, in all homes, and not just for music, but your entire life! No consent needed. Have a nice day! :)
Comments like this worry me that HN is being dragged down with the wider culture wars and truthiness that’s destroying all that we have. I would hope for better in this forum.
Have you seen the latest YCombinator batch?
How is he wrong though? "Bad vibes" all you want but there is a reason. The golden ages are over.
How is the OP right? Huge claims require huge evidence; this trope has been disproven over and over again. Security researchers look at exactly this kind of thing, and nevermind this community is full of the people who would actually build such a thing. A massive dragnet isn’t actually as valuable as you think it would be.
What has happened to HN commenting?
Everyone is trying to make reddit hot take comments with a sneer as they type it out.
Anyways. This is a cool website.
This is amazing
You're keeping charts, right? I wanna know what the top hit on that block is next month
Looks like the results are exported to a CSV file: https://walzr.com/bop-spotter/export
Nice. there's a selection bias as the people who play music loud enough to be heard from their cars and several genres there just don't overlap at all.
if we're acknowledging that the music played from cars is neighbourhood vibe, it raises the question of whether they are interfering with the neighbourhood as well.
I was waiting for someone to sneak in a anti-car angle into this and presto what have you ! Haha
How does this project not run afoul of federal and state wiretapping laws?
> http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/california-recording-law
It will be good to see if it can run continuously with only solar power to replenish the battery.
BTW I'm curious what the solar setup is?
I was on the ground in SF yesterday and this caught a pro-Trump car convoy blasting God Bless America yesterday so it definitely can work if cars are blasting music. Certainly an interesting project.
How do you get the data out of the Shazam app (?)
I was wondering the same. Also curious about those battery stats:
> Battery currently at 80% (a decrease of 6% in the last 4 hours).
That's gotta be an OLED screen at lowest brightness or, even more likely, a fully black overlay app since the mic is constantly active and either locally processing it into Shazam and streaming fingerprints or (less cpu, more network) streaming it to a server which then does the processing and queries Shazam. As a comparison, my work phone is off+idle basically the whole time and takes twice as long to charge at a higher wattage as my personal phone (i.e.: large battery by my standards), and that uses nearly a percent per hour while the screen is off with maybe 20 messages and one email coming in across 4 hours.
I'm amazed by the idea, that no rate limit has kicked in on Shazam, that they didn't connect it to a power source, and that the battery is lasting so long!
Edit: missed that it is being powered by a solar panel
They might have a power bank as a buffer for the solar panel. Doesn't really go into detail.
They likely removed the screen entirely
If you link it to your Spotify, Shazam will add anything it recognizes in a special playlist.
I was going to complain that it had a non-duplicate constraint.. but then I realized you could remove from the other end and have a managed pubsub queue, nice.
Would be cool if this updated a playlist with everything heard, so we could follow along.
Nice idea - it'd be interesting to do some stats on matching accuracy, eg:
links to the captured street noise that matched .. and I (perhaps others can) cannot hear the asserted "match" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wjz9L0UOhEbut bonus points for picking up that Virreinato de Nueva España vibe.
You can faintly hear the accordion near the end of the recording.
I don't like that it shares the recordings though. It doesn't add much value and it's a privacy violation, even if it's legal.
Good effort if that's what it is (I confess, I haven't looped back to check).
Sharing for people to check is useful to bed something in, I'm not fond of the "privacy violation" but I grew up in small communities .. if you said anything within earshot in a public area it went around town faster than 10 gigabit fibre, and that was before WWW, before even TCP or the IP it sat on.
Accessible storage and replay forever is a whole level up, but these are the days in which face recognition is being rolled out to giant billboards that can display different images to different positions and track several moving pedtrasians with targeted ads based on their preferences.
See I’m not sure that it is legal. If they are re-transmitting audio is being played in public over the Internet for potentially many thousands more people, I’m pretty sure the RIAA, the UMG, & the WMG would all have something to say about it.
In general, for chickenshit like this, the worst the authorities are likely to say is "Please stop."
I listened to six and only just barely caught Just the Two of Us. Half the rest are just hallucinating.
Pixelated cover art conversions are a nice touch. How?
Super sick!! Convert this to a live radio/realtime feed
Love this idea! I presume you're using cellular? Won't it rack up a lot of costs?
Ex Shazam tech here. The signatures that the Shazam app sends are very small, so bandwith costs should be minimal. Of course, I speaking about the technology of my day 2001+, so times may have changed
It seems to also send the actual sound samples though.
I've learned when setting up a family plan that depending on how many devices you already have (my wife and I each had 1 phone and 1 apple watch) we could get an extra line with unlimited data for functionally nothing. (The sim's sitting in my dashcam right now, been silently plugging away for months)
Some phone plans like Google Fi will give you a data only sim card for free. It ends up being totally free as long as you have unlimited data plans. I use my old phone and a data only sim card for random projects.
I did some measurements on shazam and it seems to send about 7kb/minute, which corresponds to 300MB/month, i.e. no big deal. I suppose it helps that shazam was designed in the age of expensive bandwidth.
Can you do one that counts how many people go directly from drinking in front of Mr. Liquor and then into their cars or dirt bikes?
How did the author get Shazam to constantly sample songs?
wow so much latino la el musica
Some psycho is out there blaring Lou Bega mambo no 5... they must be stopped.
Sometimes you just need a little bit of Monica in your life.
I'm nervous about the battery being at 91%...is it not plugged into a constant source of power?
> It's solar powered, …
"It's solar powered"
How does it survive SanFran's infamous sea fog that rolls in from time to time?
the mission is one of the least foggy neighborhoods
Super cool! This is a proper fusion of innovation and creativity.
Can you add youtube music as a "listen to" link?
Cool idea, we need a way to stream the playlist!
can you also make it tell people to turn the noise down
Why did you move to the Mission, a noisy neighborhood, if you don’t like noise?
Fuck this is so cool love it
I love this. Beautiful, simple, but just a little subversive.
:chef’s kiss:
I spent too much time on TikTok, because I got confused how a "bop" spotter even worked.
Yes, I'm quite upset about the repurposing of "bop" to be offensive, it was a good word and I liked its old meaning.
For anyone who doesn't know, 'bop' to gen Z is a derogatory term for a sexually active woman, it basically means 'slut'.
Redefining existing words is something that really irritates me, particularly when it's used to attack women.
> For anyone who doesn't know, 'bop' to gen Z is a derogatory term for a sexually active woman, it basically means 'slut'.
I have never heard this and I'm "Gen Z". I looked at Urban Dictionary and the earliest definition that says slut goes back to 2005, so "Gen Z" definitely didn't come up with it.
I wonder if it's a twist or corruption of the whole "bonk" horny jail nonsense when someone posts something thirsty?
We used "bopping around" as a term to describe a sexually confident woman enjoying herself on the scene, as a generally positive term, at least since 2015, so I'm not sure it's a zoomer thing. Did it become a derogatory term? As we used it it was explicitly in opposition to "slut," it was a word of empowerment. Like yeah she gets laid good for her.
Blitzkrieg.... Hoes?
I've spent a few more minutes than I should have trying to work this out. The only way I can figure this is it's related to the head movement? Still not sure. I sure do have very little love for this generation though
Having heard some Gen Z terms before, it's probably some initials, like "big old pussy" or something like that.
I fucking love this. hilarious idea
Now this is a unique idea.
I'd like to see this rolled out widely so we can get some map of music.
Good idea, not great execution.
Why not? Seems to perfect execution to me. Solar powered, neat website, what else could you ask for?
Audio is noise, no songs.
Clicked through to see if this was using the 2024/TikTok definition of "bop". That would be a very different app. Not infeasible. Possibly illegal.