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.
I think this is really cool, and am surprised by some of the negative comments here
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.
European law tends not to like "clever" workarounds. IANAL but I belive you would still be practicing illegal surveillance.
Would that not mean that Shazaam is illegal Germany? From my limited searching it doesn't seem like it is.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
I guess no one with loud music considers themself an asshole, so this should be actually giving the information on exactly what you mention.
I had a collogue who installed his speaker setup facing backwards out of his trunk. He knew what he was doing.
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
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 idea - it'd be interesting to do some stats on matching accuracy, eg:
September 29, 2024 6:53 PM
La Banda Del Carro Rojo
Los Tigres del Norte
but 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.
Cool idea, we need a way to stream the playlist!
Can you add youtube music as a "listen to" link?
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
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.
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"
Super cool! This is a proper fusion of innovation and creativity.
Good idea, not great execution.
Now this is a unique idea.
I'd like to see this rolled out widely so we can get some map of music.
I love this. Beautiful, simple, but just a little subversive.
:chef’s kiss:
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?
I fucking love this. hilarious idea
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.
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.
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.
Since it's not legal I presume you'll be fine if someone destroys your shitty surveillance equipment.
Go get consent, sweaty.
Who exactly is being surveiled here? How is their privacy being affected by this?
This device is not surveilling anyone as far as I can tell. It's logging music that's being played in public in its vicinity. It's not tracking individuals, it's not recording faces.
When someone does something in public, they sort of lose the claim/right to privacy, because they are doing it /in public/. If they wanted privacy they should have done their thing in private.
If you are not willing to grant consent to this thing listening to you, then maybe you should not walk around in public playing your music loudly. Or should everyone who is within earshot of you first get your consent, else they must stick their fingers in their ears?
If you select a title, you can play the full recording that led to the song being recognized. It's not just the song metadata that is recorded and uploaded to the website, but all the captured audio.
Ah I did not realize that. But again - if you have issues with your public statements and activities being, well, public - then you probably should not be doing these things in public in the first place.
Nobody's being tracked here, I'm not aware of some data model being built up, of specific songs played by specific individuals, with time and date and location being attached to it.
If you want to shout out your banking login on the sidewalk while you are playing a song out loud, then I guess that's on you and you can't be unhappy about the fact that this thing recorded you.
That's not how things work in many countries, so it's a legit statement to find it creepy and dangerous, even though it is not illegal in the US.
NAL but in most jurisdictions anything that happens in public is freely recordable.
The illegal part here is likely the attachment of a device to public property without permission from local authorities.
However, the same service would likely be legal if a few people were hired to walk around with microphones. Or potentially if the microphones were attached to vehicles.
Edit - also might be legal if OP purchased / leased some property facing the street.
Fun fact: Nielsen actually does this (hires people to walk around with microphones) for purposes of broadcast TV/radio audience ratings: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_People_Meter
Just because it would be legal for you to record it, doesn’t mean it’s legal for you to hide a recorder there without your presence.
The “use of a public pole” isn’t really the issue.
> Go get consent, sweaty.
The best way to get consent.
Point out what [constitutionally valid] law it’s broken; if it’s audible to the ear from a public location in San Francisco (or anywhere in the US) then you’re allowed to record it (similarly if you can see it from a public vantage point, then you can photograph it).
If you weren’t it would be legally impossible for any two people to leave two voice messages simultaneously while in earshot of each other. You also couldn’t use Spotify in public ever.
You can certainly get in trouble for the uses you put that recording to, but as the OP isn’t selling or rebroadcasting and would have a solid fair use defense for any incidental copyright infringement, I don’t see any colorable claim that anyone this thing can hear has any reasonable expectation of privacy from it.
BTW, it’s making a very good point about actual surveillance equipment that is quite possibly installed all around you.