Bop Spotter | Hacker News

Posted on by Vaseline

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.

About 15 years ago I read an NYT article where all corporate audio, at least of the musical variety, had if codes embedded in the streams that passive listener devices could pick up.

I believe the point was for detection of royalty fees for public playback of songs.

I since have heard nothing about this, was that article true, and could you use it for this project?

The undercurrent of my interest was the pernicious tracking aspect, which is hilarious given it preceded the smartphone and it’s active monitoring of everything you do

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!

If 2% of the battery is 2% of 3000mAh (which is probably a generous over-estimate of the phone’s capacity), that means the phone pulls ~60mA.

You can buy a 60,000 mAh battery (or build one) for about $50, which would buy this device 10,000 hours, or round it down and call it 1 year.

For another use case, I experienced that the phone battery starts swelling after few months. It was an indoor setup and I had removed the phone backcover to avoid overheating.

That’s so cool, I gotta check out this Tasker thing!

>when it boots again

Do any Android phones turn on automatically when sufficiently charged? The ones I’ve had stay switched off but with a little battery charging animation. (I think my old iPhone auto powered on when charged past a certain percentage though.)

I used an old Motorola phone for this, and yes, if it dies it won’t turn back on again until the power button is pressed. I Googled around and there’s a way to disable this behavior though, through an ADB command. The bad part is that it supposedly might get stuck in a boot loop – it tries to boot but there’s not enough battery yet, so it dies and keeps trying to boot. Over and over.

I made a second Tasker automation, so it shuts down with less than 15 percent battery. It might still get stuck in a boot loop, but eventually the solar panel will quickly charge it above 15% so that it won’t be for very long.

Most android phones have a feature that lets you set a time at which the phone should turn itself on at a certain time. I used this as a last resort in a project with similar requirements, but I don’t remember if we ever ended up testing if it worked after fully draining the battery.

When the phone is “off” but showing the charging animation, it’s actually booted and the animation is a program it’s running. There used to be a hack, I don’t know if it works on modern Android, where you’d essentially edit the init scripts and tell it that the charging animation task should be the rest of the boot process, or your specific app of interest.

surely shazam will realize when one IP address is responsible for 1000x a usual person’s bandwidth?

or, given Pixel phones can identify audio in the background seemingly without impacting battery, are modern algorithms for identifying music from audio so efficient that shazam pays almost nothing per clip?

At least with the recent Pixels there’s an option to have your phone listen 24/7 and tell you what music is playing.
Probably difficult to distinguish this tower from a homeless guy sitting in a subway station listening to different music all day.

That app (“Now playing”) is the same technology as Shazam but it’s local, because this isn’t actually difficult on modern hardware. It’s the same technique the Pixel uses to notice that somebody said “Google” to it, again without needing a remote server.

Now Playing has a smaller database than Shazam does but the technology would work fine with a larger database if you wanted that, which for this application you might.

However, unsurprisingly Google did not give away the technology.

A bit disappointing that this sends audio recordings to a server. Even if it’s not the intention, that leaves so much possibility for abuse.

Why not use a Pixel phone with on-device song matching? It also keeps history on device. Getting that data out of the app might be a little tricky, but should be possible.

Perfect is the enemy of good. I’ve found it’s much better to get a project up and running as an “MVP” than to chase the perfect until the details suck all the fun out of it.

I don’t see what that has to do with what I said. Chasing an MVP doesn’t have to involve disrespecting people’s privacy and recording without consent.

There are many worse violators than this, but it is what it is.

It’s a very public place in the United States. It’s not clear that people should expect or be entitled to much privacy in these public places.

We also know that, regardless of the degree of privacy to which people should be entitled, they’re not legally entitled to much privacy in these places. Federal court rulings have been extremely clear on this point. In these places, we don’t even have the right to not be photographed.

>they’re not legally entitled to much privacy in these places.

While I think this is a really cool project, I also agree with the privacy issues. CA is a two party consent state, and recording a conversation (which this is likely to do) like this is likely illegal. While a person might not have a expectation of privacy about someone just hearing the conversation, they are protected by law if they are recorded without their knowledge.

NB: I am not a lawyer, and the above could very well be wrong.

Edit: As I was informed below, I was wrong on the legal points.

There is no right to privacy in a public space. It is not illegal to record an area where individuals would not have the expectation of privacy, even without their consent. Therefore, this is not illegal.

If this were a restaurant, that would be a different story.

Yup you are totally right for CA:

> Exceptions (one-party consent required): (1) where there is no expectation of privacy, (2) recording within government proceedings that are open to the public, (3) recording certain crimes or communications regarding such crimes (for the purpose of obtaining evidence), (4) a victim of domestic violence recording a communication made to
him/her by the perpetrator (for the purpose of obtaining a restraining order or
evidence that the perpetrator violated an existing restraining order), and (5) a peace officer recording a communication within a location in response to an emergency hostage situation.

Source: https://www.mwl-law.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/RECORDING…

> There is no right to privacy in a public space.

No legally protected right. This doesn’t mean it is ethical, and given that it is a protected right in other jurisdictions shows it deserves more consideration and should not be hand waived away.

If “it’s legal” is the argument being used to defense a behavior, it’s safe to assume it’s not actually a good one.

It is good to care about this sort of thing, but this is untargeted recording in public. It is not very different to the fact that if I was recording a home movie in public I may incidentally record someone’s conversation.

The real harm would occur if the conversations were being stored and analysed systematically, for example by police. But the OP is not doing that (they claim).

I sincerely doubt that. Should you blindly apply it to everything? Of course not, nuance exists.

Apply it OP’s project. The project is super cool, popular, and most of all it’s done and it exists. The worst thing you can say about it is that it’s not perfect and failed one weird purity test. Oh no, public audio gets sent to a server!

I don’t get what you mean by “possibility for abuse”. The author abusing it? Well if they wanted to do that they wouldn’t have built the whole music detection thing and wrote about it on the internet. If Shazam gets breached or turns evil, we have infinitely bigger problems than this one phone on this one street. If the author’s server gets hacked, the hacker wouldn’t care about this – the hackers who want large surveillance networks hack phones and IoT crap, not random people’s home servers.

And honestly, as a commentary on how commonplace and normal mass surveillance has become, which this project seems to be, I quite like the threat of “there is a box out there somewhere that sends everything it hears to a server and it does this not for good or evil, but because one programmer was bored and thought what if I could know what song was playing in the cafe across the street”.

Different old songs (still on Shazam) in lat and long direction, if you find two of them you have the exact location.

Could also place a directional speaker on top of your cars roof to not listen to it yourself or interrupt neighbors, just to be able to locate it.

I’d suggest playing darude – sandstorm on loop, fairly loudly but with a (cone) directional speaker pointing straight upwards, spiraling in towards mission & 20th st starting ~6 blocks out in each direction. Record the time when you reach each intersection, and you’ll know exactly which street segment you were on when your song got shazam’d, without having to actually ride on every segment (save roughly 50% travel time compared to doing the full grid).

Space-filling curve with a single song sequence? …Non-Euclidean space-filling curve, technically, because it has to fit the city grid topology.

Large phased-array speaker on a stationary balloon platform above the city, capable of rapidly scanning and blasting every telephone pole in the neighborhood?

If you’ve never lived in a major urban area in the US, I imagine this might seem strange. People drive around with music playing loud enough that a crappy mic would easily pick it 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.

I wonder what the chance of the birthday paradox affecting the music is. Given that y song will make up x% of plays, how likely is it that any song has two consecutive plays, or two plays within an hour?

Or spotify jamming a song into everyone’s algorithms, as a cynical take.

I have never looked up and played Drake or Taylor Swift, but they come up in “curated” playlists thought-provokingly often.

> I have never looked up and played Drake or Taylor Swift, but they come up in “curated” playlists thought-provokingly often.

That’s not necessarily due to payola or whatever – both Drake and Swift are very talented as well as prolific and among the best operating these days, even if they are pop artists. It’s not strange to see them recommended algorithmically if the listener is into modern music at all.

I almost exclusively listen to music from before the 90s, and Spotify has never once tried to play me anything from either of those artists, so that seems like a more likely explanation to me.

That’s pretty unfair. Drake’s writing abilities are questionable, but his ability as an performer is undeniable. Swift is well known for both writing and performing and her popularity speaks to her skill and many years of effort.

Were they helped by having wealthy parents and breaking into the industry young? Certainly. Is that the whole story? Definitely not.

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?

Malmquist bias(0) for neighborhood music!

It would be hard to find that correlation because you can’t get a base rate. I don’t think you can measure the distance, so you don’t know if it’s loud or close. Maybe there’s no correlation independent of the music taste of the neighborhood.

Lots of Spanish doesn’t surprise me. It’s a neighborhood that’s still largely Mexican, and Latin Pop is really big in the US in general.

(0)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmquist_bias

The Mission has a lot of Latin American restaurants, bars and nightclubs that attract a Spanish-speaking clientele (or people who want to meet Spanish speakers) from outside the neighborhood. And the neighborhood itself is around a third Spanish-speaking.

I think there’s definitely a bias towards songs that you’re going to blast from your car with the windows down. As someone decades away from that stage of life, it would be unlikely that anything that I listen to would show up in the lists (and, in fact, skimming over a couple days’ songs, there were only three songs I recognized, although a few more artists).

I used to go build houses in Tijuana with a charity, and invariably, some neighbor would see us building, and come out with some speakers to absolutely blast mariachi. Always followed up by a wave or a thumbs up, implicit that an objective net improvement had just been deployed.

I loved that feature of my old Pixel. Even in the middle of Germany, with no cell reception whatsoever, I’d surprise people by looking at the always-on-display to see what song was playing somewhere.

Yeah it’s pretty cool that it runs off-line. I wonder how large the local database is? They did add a second togglable option that lets you chose an online search if the song not recognized.

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.)

Realizing that you enjoyed being forced to listen to music you didn’t decide to listen to doesn’t mean you might be an asshole for not enjoying it at other times. That’s ridiculous.

That’s nice you can get some nice story out of it but I do think people who grew up in cities have a totally different mindset than the rest of us.

For me, I don’t want to live in a cacophony of noises 24/7. That goes for music, non-stop ambulances, loud speakers, etc.

I tried and decided that those places are not for me, so I moved back to smaller and much quieter places (I very much prefer the sound of rivers, insects and wild birds to other people’s sounds.)

It might make me an asshole but it’s also quite natural to be drawn to peace, so there that.

I’m willing to bet 99.99% of the time you hear music from outside a car it’s not due to someone being hard of hearing, unless they caused that issue themselves by listening to music too loud.

However, if you are hard of hearing to the point where you are actually disturbing others, I would recommend headphones.

It is not generally legal to drive while wearing headphones. In some US states it is specifically banned, and in many others you will get pulled over for distracted driving. (The thinking is partly because it makes it more difficult to hear emergency vehicle sirens).

Background noise makes it difficult for the hard of hearing to listen to conversation.

If we cared more for the hard of hearing we would reduce music volumes and make restaurants quieter. Our society doesn’t care even though it pretends to.

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”.

OK, that makes sense in the context of “another round of shots”.

But in my experience, party intensity and music volume are generally correlated, so you would probably turn down the former by turning down the latter.

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.

He knew what he was doing, but YOU had no clue what he was doing. Low frequency audio is close to non-directional, you install subwoofers where it is convenient to fit them, not to “aim” the sound in any particular direction.

Mine is firing directly upwards. I’m not trying to knock birds out of the sky.

Subs are non-directional, as someone else pointed out, and bass sound waves need room to propagate. The actual direction they get “aimed” can also depend on the trunk area and shape.

My subs, while currently pointing backwards, would have been better firing upwards for no other reason than the manufacturer (Audiofrog) doesn’t recommend grills. As it is, I have to be careful what I place in my trunk to avoid punching a hole in the cone.

I spent several years in South America, and down there (it varies by country, but by and large) it’s totally normal for people to play music on loudspeaker on public transport, walking down the street, in the park, etc, nobody bats an eyelid. The same behaviour in most western countries is met with disdainful looks, and often with someone else blatantly telling the “offender” to put on headphones. So, yeah, it does depend on the culture.

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.

In my experience it is function of how a society values personal space and courtesy.

You do find a lot of social music in high density environments such as in found in global south or in America cities where personal space is not a much of a choice , while Taiwan (or Japan or Korea) is high density too the extreme courteous culture makes them different.

It is also different in what makes public music, it is not necessarily someone playing their favorite songs , in India for example things like religious events or weddings or funerals people tolerate and even expect public music but typically don’t accept say a guy with a boom box .

It is very different way of growing up and living if you have to no choice but hear neighbors fighting or having sex , public music wouldn’t feel so offensive when you hear a lot things you prefer not to daily.

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.

Rather than relying on the bop spotter timestamp, you could play thirty-second snatches of different extremely obscure songs, on a schedule. When one of them turns up on the bop spotter, you know when you were passing it, to thirty seconds precision.

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.

The amount of gentrification in the Mission varies a lot based on where you go.

I volunteer on 24th st. weekly, something I’ve been doing since 2019. The crowd at the volunteering is mostly immigrants. I am white, native English speaker but I speak decent Spanish.

It’s mind boggling to me sometimes how the two communities exist in nearly the same space but don’t often overlap. I remember one time I went into a restaurant and they engaged with me in Spanish right off the bat, we never switched to English, I got a table to dine-in and they waited on me and it felt pretty much like dining at a restaurant like in travels I’ve had in central America… A few months later I brought a friend to the same place and I ended up getting a 100% gringo restaurant experience.

Another place down the street and the cashier is like some very pale upper midwest looking hipstery guy who looks “whiter than me”, and it felt like a totally different world, one that didn’t overlap at all with description above.

Just offering another point of data, your observation of the “same space with no overlap” and the anecdote about the restaurant hits so true for me! Almost the exactly same thing happened to me, Spanish nearly the whole time. Later, with a coworker, 100% gringo experience. Hilarious! The alternation between places like this as you walk up 24th always struck me as notable.

This couldn’t have been later than 2011, at which time the zeitgeist was replete with jabs at the ongoing gentrification. 🙂

That’s funny, I was heading uptown the other day, sipping on an elixir and thinking about shaving another kilowatt off my bill, when some casanova got out of a phone booth and asked me for directions to the daytona 500 club or some other make out room. I lolo’d out loud and docs clocked him in the teeth. Pretty sure he had to change his napper tandy after that.

you really clinched the zeitgeist of the mission district, are you a professional writer, part time? I’m just grateful to be in your orbit. that kind of success will cost you a mint. I’d wake up in a fit of delerium. What’s the ABV of that drink you just gave me? But okay, let’s get down to brass tacks. it’s last call, and I’ve got work to so I’m not going to go on a bender. I’m not a flying pig so let’s just sit down where the willows and the sycamore trees meet and hideout there and wait for someone to give us last rites.

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.

It involves a massive increase in housing prices, primarily brought about by artificial supply restrictions, that results in unintentional displacement. The reason the Mission is still variegated is rent control, along with various forms of affordable housing, housesharing, master tenant slumlords, SROs, extended family arrangements, etc. It’s a pretty unique and amazing place really.

Ellis evictions suck particularly hard because they can happen out of the blue for any building, even if you chose one suited for long tenancies. I don’t know what percentage results in protests, but it’s quite a few. Some of the contested ones fail on technical grounds before they get to the protest stage (1).

(1) https://sftu.org/ellis/

I’m not a Bay Area person, but was visiting a few months ago and got a new tattoo at Rose & Thorn right off the 16th BART station. Took a walk around waiting for the appointment and it’s crazy how fast the vibe changes from block to block.

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.

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

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.

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.

You would still need a way to map the music to the person listening to it.

Apple and Google could do this if you use their music services, but they already know where you are.

I suppose if I have very unique taste in music and someone else knew about it, they could track me, but this is easily foiled by wearing headphones.

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 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?

I’ve listened to a bunch of the snippets and you can usually just barely hear the sound in the background. Which makes me think Shazam is very accurate. I really should read more about how Shazam’s algorithm works, because it feels like magic.

The phone records 10 minute chunks of audio at a time, in airplane mode. Every 10 minutes, airplane mode is turned off and the audio is uploaded to a server. The server then splits the audio into 15 second overlapping chunks, and each is passed to Shazam’s API (no official API, but someone reverse engineered it and made a great Python package). This setup is super power efficient! The phone dips down to a minimum 70% percent battery by the early morning.

Holy cow.

Just clicked around and you’re right: the Sep 29 5:19pm snippet detected “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang, and there’s almost nothing there. But it’s in there.

Had I not known what I was listening for, and been intentionally listening, there’s zero chance I’d have picked up on it.

It does feel like magic.

The battery will live much longer if you run it from 80% down to 50%. There are some clever plugs you can get off the shelf if your phone doesn’t support setting this in software.

I doubt the “design brief” for this involves ensuring it’s got thousands or days worth of expected battery charging lifetime.

There’s already people here discussing the best way to locate it. Sooner or later someone’s gonna find a “free phone” and trade it for a point of meth somewhere just off 16th and Mission…

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” — Mark Twain

I suspect moisture damage from Karl The Fog rolling in every afternoon is more likely to kill it.

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.

> I know Shazam does most of its work on very high frequencies

Are you sure about that? High frequencies don’t propagate as well (and, beyond a point, aren’t reproduced at all by cheap speakers), so that would seem to limit its effectiveness pretty severely.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The legality of it only matters if you get caught. So don’t use hardware or software that’s traceable back to you, and be sufficiently careful to remain undetected when you install it. People often weigh the likelihood of being caught much, much higher than it actually is, and therefore conclude “I mustn’t do anything illegal”, which is irrational.

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.

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 I was going for (but poorly expressed) is that if your goal is to figure out what people listen to within a geographical area, streaming service data seems far more comprehensive than putting one mic on one random street.

The goal here seems more focused towards informing people about the existence and imprecision of shot spotters than actually trying to determine anything about regional music interests.

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 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 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 feel this so bad, I used to make little software that solves my problem, now whenever I want to build anything I think about “is it going to be useful for my resume?” instead of fun things and I always quit because it then put lots of pressure on me for building “useful but not fun” projects.

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!

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

links to the captured street noise that matched .. and I (perhaps others can) cannot hear the asserted “match” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wjz9L0UOhE

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.

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.

The clips are a few seconds long and the use does not appear to be commercial, even then their inclusion could be seen as fair use to a reasonable person.

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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

They’re listening in a public place, where there is no expectation of privacy. Also, it’s not clear it can hear any conversations, only music may be loud enough to teach it. Finally, it’s not recording the sounds, only analyzing them.

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.

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!

> It’d be nice to not see that “translate this page” pop up

Many of the songs detected are latin artists with like monikers and song names.

Is there a way to suppress/prevent google from analyzing the contents of a page and determining such?

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?

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.

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’d doubt it. Installing an app for a dark screen overlay is so much less work compared to disassembling it and then somehow getting it to boot again and being able to control it to trigger Shazam continuously

heh, someone’s music program didn’t get the right track on the first search:

2:05 AM – DM – Yailin la Mas Viral

2:03 AM – Nota – Yailin la Mas Viral

I can already see Matt Levine’s column: if someone places secret recorders at Starbucks and leaks the transcript to the internet, is it insider trading?

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.

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.

First usage I can think of is “boppers” in Paul Wall & Kanye West’s 2005 “Drive Slow.” It’d be a hell of a coincidence if they weren’t related. In Wall’s oeuvre it just seems to denote “the women I’m interested in” without much in the way of connotation.

> The disco ball in my mouth insinuates I’m ballin’
> I’m leaning on the switch, sitting crooked in my slab
> But I could still catch boppers if I drove a cab

https://genius.com/20328302

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

> really irritates me, particularly when it’s used to attack women.

It’s black slang and it’s decades old.

Rather than being some Woke Simp the truth is you don’t like the way lower class black people speak.

Or maybe you don’t like TikTokers speaking like lower class black people?

Or you could get over yourself and just explain words?

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.

Setting up a hidden microphone that is constantly streaming to a server that is recording it forever should be illegal, if it isn’t already.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As far as I can tell, by boosting each recording and listening to the purported song in full, I can eventually hear just a snippet of that song. Shazam’s algorithm is extremely good.

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.

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.

It has not been disproven. A simple Google search “is my phone listening to me” provides a resounding yes.

These things need to hear your prompt at the very least, which entails (in many cases, if not most) listening at all times.

Security researchers DO look at this and they, along with everyone else, just shrug because you technically DID give consent when you accepted the thousand line policy you didn’t read.

Hot word detection to activate an assistant occurs locally on your device for the purpose of activating said assistant. That is a far cry from “Pretty sure Apple and Google already do this, just to all phones, in all homes, and not just for music, but your entire life!” which suggests that both Apple and Google are deploying a dragnet uploading a 24/7 recording to their servers for nefarious purposes. That is just simply not true. That at minimum would leave a constant trail of bytes being sent over the network (which isn’t the case), and would massively drain battery life. It’s also highly illegal.

You and I can go back and forth on how the other is wrong by providing various internet links. I’ll start:

“Mobile devices, the researchers conclude, listen to conversations through microphones and create personalized ads based on what the person wants or has done.” (1)

“This passive listening ensures the virtual assistants are ready to help you with a task when needed. However, depending on the developer, voice tech apps may also use your conversation data to recommend ads and content. For instance, Google uses Assistant conversation data to personalize ad and content recommendations. Others, like Apple’s Siri, claim not to use conversation data to build marketing profiles or curate ads.” (2)

But this exercise will actually produce less fruitful results because it’s possible to prove anything via the online “research” nowadays. So let’s try a different tack- thinking for ourselves.

FAANG are extremely notorious brokers of data. Everything about you and your browsing behavior is collected. I hope we can agree on this. Then why on earth would your conclusion be “they don’t broker or process our audio data”? You’ll have to have something better than it would consume battery life or would leave an identifiable trail of bytes, both of which could be mitigated by some clever programming.

Much better to have the hypothesis (hence “pretty sure”) that they do, and then scrutinize. Until something definitive comes out that they absolutely do not, it’s much more solid ground than a conclusion that you can simply trust these large corporations.

(1) https://dobetter.esade.edu/en/phone-listening-personalized-a…
(2) https://us.norton.com/blog/how-to/is-my-phone-listening-to-m….

This comes up a lot, but the reality is that people are fairly predictable and Apple and Google don’t need to literally listen (expensive) to make fairly accurate guesses about your behavior.

All they need is enough metadata.

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.

You dismiss my point by dismissing its tone, but you fail to address the actual substance, which is a failure to follow HN norms in itself.

Agreed, it’s a cool website. Very strange how it’s seemingly novel, while this tech is actually already deployed to all our phones.

Is that a better, more nuanced, less individualistic, and more conformist way of expressing my idea?

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