Music is everywhere. In every wireless earbud, in every passing car, in every street artist. A shop letting sounds escape, a person trying to recognize "that" song… fleeting moments lost in seconds. Bop Spotter is a project by Riley Walz that seeks to capture those moments, those melodies. With the exact dose of Android and Shazam, Bop Spotter behaves like a 24/7 system that "listens" on some lost street in San Francisco and takes note of the music people prefer…
In the United States they use something called "gunshot locator". The company SoundThinking, previously known as ShotSpotter, has sold this technology to 130 cities and security agencies. The most striking thing is that there are huge doubts about its effectiveness, to such an extent that it has even confused helicopters with gunshots.
However, nothing prevents us from turning a bad idea into a good one, and that is exactly what Riley Walz did. After investing around a hundred dollars in hardware, Walz created Bop Spotter, an equivalent to ShotSpotter but focused on music.
Bop Spotter: What do the streets of San Francisco listen to?
The technical details are very simple: at some point in San Francisco's Mission District there is a pole with a box hanging. Inside that box is hidden a basic Android phone, a microphone, and a solar charger. The phone has Shazam open permanently, 24/7, and its only job is to identify the music the microphone captures on the street. The name of each song is published almost in real time, with official links to Spotify and Apple Music.
Walz calls it "cultural surveillance", without consent, but without complaints. Unlike what ShotSpotter tries to do, the idea is not to catch criminals, but waves, moods, "vibe". The total of Shazams detected (at the time of writing) is 880. That gives an average of about 156.4 songs per day, and all its results can be downloaded in a very convenient CSV file. Link below!
Official site: Click here
