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Some details on how this works: https://twitter.com/rtwlz/status/1840821351055311245
The phone has a Tasker script running on loop (even if
the battery dies, it’ll restart when it boots again)
Script records 10 min of audio in airplane mode, then
comes out of airplane mode and connects to nearby free
WiFi.
Then uploads the audio file to my server, which splits it
into 15 sec chunks that slightly overlap. Passes each to
Shazam’s API (not public, but someone reverse engineered
it and made a great Python package). Phone only uses 2%
of power every hour when it’s not charging!Alright, who wants to go wardriving around the mission with me, blasting Never Gonna Give You Up?
I notice that on September 28 (near the top of the list, since it doesn't seem to have anything for today yet) the same Pitbull song was detected separately a little less than an hour apart, and I can't help but wonder if it was the same person listening to it on loop. Several months ago, my fiancee and I overheard someone driving outside blasting Adele's "Someone Like You" from inside our apartment, and every 45 minutes or so we'd hear it again, so we couldn't help but assume it was the same person driving around the city with it on loop, probably going through some rough breakup or something.
Cool. And I noticed that a surprisingly high number of songs are in Spanish. So I'll venture to hypothesize that this project will identify a correlation between musical taste and preference for how loud it is played, rather than accurately capturing the "musical taste of the neighborhood". Any thoughts on that? Have you tested how loud a song needs to be played in order to be picked up?
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!
> But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes.
Love this so much.
I hear a Muni bus stop nearby, and a lot of voices at 3AM, so I am guessing it's near bars, maybe Mission street. Maybe a pole near enough to an apartment fire escape to ziptie a solar panel. I wonder if the timestamps are accurate enough for me to ride my bike down mission blasting a song, and check strava for where I was at that timestamp, then spot the spotter. Just for fun of course, not to post or dox.
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.
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.
I think this is really cool, and am surprised by some of the negative comments here
I love the styling of this page. Everything is so consistent. Sometimes you'll see someone with a similar retro approach, but rarely do all the page elements follow the style this well.
I think somebody spotted your microphone.
Love that - thought about sharing your source for any of us interested in doing this in our city? Fund idea
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?
so so cool and the spirit of this project (which seems to speak to many other commenters too) really reminds me of this recent hackernews post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41395413 'The secret inside One Million Checkboxes'
the creativity in endeavors like these really just elicits total joy. it's infectious!
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!]
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 hate that my first thought was "why isn't the apple music button monetized with their affiliate tag". Thanks for doing something cool for cool's sake.
This is amazing
You're keeping charts, right? I wanna know what the top hit on that block is next month
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.
I love this idea, and I also love the way the website presents it.
Short blurb. Says what it is, how it's built. Then compares it to something you might already know about, to explain what it does. Lastly says why it matters, why it's cool, right before directly showing you the results in real-time.
Very nice. Very cool project. And I honestly find it impressive too how effectively and naturally it gets the point across.
Love this idea! I presume you're using cellular? Won't it rack up a lot of costs?
For what it's worth, this is on page 6 for all-time HN everything, so congrats, Walz. Also, I'm curious how this would be different in other cities. What are the most commonly played songs? How does this differ from the typical lists (Billboard, for instance)? There's so much data here!
Glorious. Excellent work @walz. Reminds me of the work of the artists in the now very sadly defunct https://fffff.at/
I LOVE IT!
I would love to see a "Playlist per day" so you can listen to the vibe of the city on a particular day and not just one song at a time.
And really nice working making a visual attitude that burns into you memory...
Some psycho is out there blaring Lou Bega mambo no 5... they must be stopped.
Fantastic idea! The detection doesn’t seem very actuate through - most of it is noise with no actual music playing in the background. I don’t know how the algorithm assumes it’s a song.
Love it! A piece of the sort of Internet that's largely gone missing. If anything I wish it could automatically add to <insert platform> playlists.
The design inspiration site https://mschfplaysvenmo.com/ also looks pretty fun.
Super cool! This is a proper fusion of innovation and creativity.
AWESOME project. thank you for the inspiration! and the hope!
Agree with all the positive takes in here. Just wanted to add that the graphic design is chef's kiss. Especially the image transformation of the album art! Some of them are hard to parse and it almost becomes a game, and then there are others where it's clear as day that e.g. the band is posing for a picture. Also just recognizing covers that you know is fun.
Love the setup. I’m sure one can make this using Apple shortcuts too since there’s a Shazam api offered in it.
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?
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.
The next step is to place a few of these around, so you can map out which way which vibes are going.
I'm nervous about the battery being at 91%...is it not plugged into a constant source of power?
How does this project not run afoul of federal and state wiretapping laws?
Would be cool if this updated a playlist with everything heard, so we could follow along.
Does Spotify/Apple has a page like this to show the trends on a Map? That would be cool. I guess they have all the data to do it. It will be interesting to follow the trends - live.
This is so freaking cool!! What a great idea and beautiful execution.
This has cool and has made a grim, grey Tuesday morning feel a lot more fun. I would love to hook it up to a Spotify/Amazon Music/Apple Music playlist generator.
Love this!
It feels like the album art could make use of some cool dithering algorithm instead of a simple black/white filter. Something in the style of Return of the Obra Dinn.
Quick bit of feedback: Google translate thinks this page is in Spanish (I wonder why). It’d be nice to not see that “translate this page” pop up. Otherwise, cool project!
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?
Appreciate the website style. Reminds me of C&C for some reason or one of the OG RTS games - can't remember which one.
I love this. Beautiful, simple, but just a little subversive.
:chef’s kiss:
I love everything about this.
There is this undercurrent to our technology landscape. A kind of subculture somewhere in the locus of the hackersphere where a kind of punk-rock ethos rules the roost. I can only describe it as a live exploration of concepts _through_ technology, where functional fixedness is a foreign concept, including in the shared experience of social construct; everything becomes parts to be remixed in a way. In this place people just do things that, by way of having fun, just becomes art. It's emergent gameplay just by following a solitary "rule of cool."
I saw this page and was immediately transported back to the late 1990's and early 'aughts. The kind of "I glued these things together and just look" attitude that graced the pages of hackaday.com and slashdot.org. LED "throwies" come to mind.
In this case we have a de-facto art installation. I imagine that this was probably put together with odds and ends, maybe installed illegally, and probably doesn't have longevity in mind for its construction. It lightheartedly challenges some conventions, challenges ideas about privacy, brushes up against copyright, and is entertaining to boot. Most importantly, how it was made is less interesting than what it _does_, and where it carries the conversation of the observer. Or maybe: that's the point.