A special project to find good music. In San Francisco’s Mission district, a microphone was installed on a street pole to record the songs people listen to in their cars or while walking down the street. Called “Bop Spotter,” it is a project by Riley Walz, a 22-year-old young man.
More precisely, he installed a solar-powered box on top of a pole in this neighborhood, as he explained on X (ex-Twitter) on September 30. This box contains an Android smartphone permanently set to Shazam, with the microphone pointed towards the street below.
“A surveillance of culture”
Once the smartphone’s microphone plays a song, it is uploaded to a website, with links to listen to it on Spotify or Apple Music. Many titles are already listed on this site, such as Always on the run by Lenny Kravitz, wildest dreams by Taylor Swift or bad habits by Ed Sheeran.
“It’s about policing culture. Nobody notices it, nobody condones it. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about capturing vibrations. A constant flow of what happens in real time,” says Riley Walz on his site, referring to ShotSpotter, a service used to detect microphone shots.
Speaking to the site 404 Media, he explained that he recently found out about the existence of this service and “thought it would be fun to do the same thing with music”, being himself a “chronic user” of Shazam.
Source: BFM TV
