This ingenious device spies on the songs that passers-by listen to

At the end of September, a young man named Riley Walz He climbed a ladder and placed a plastic box on top of a lamp post in District Mission, a neighborhood in San Francisco. USA .

The box is like the others, but it actually hides a secret. And inside there’s a cell phone programmed to capture fragments of songs what passers-by listen to which cross the region.

The project, called Bop Watcher it’s not just about “catching the vibes.” On your website People all over the world can listen to the playlist of sounds recorded by the device. Most of the melodies are mixed with conversations, screams and car horns, creating a unique but chaotic combination.

Walz, its creator, is a 22-year-old software engineer who has participated in other curious experiments, including creating with his friends a fake steak restaurant that became real for one night and generating a random directions app for runners and cyclists.

“Bop Spotter is like a living time capsule that shows in real time what songs are being played,” the young man assured the American press.

Bob Spotter can be defined as a collector of the music that people passing through the Mission District listen to. a neighborhood historically inhabited by Latinos.

Inside the plastic box is a “Poor quality Android phone” which is configured so that the song identification application, Shazam, works without interruption, “24 hours a day, 7 days a week”, details its website. The cell phone’s microphone points downward to easily identify street noises, then records them on the Bop Spotter website.

The system remains on permanently thanks to the solar energy and can work in real time in Free public Wi-Fi what’s in the neighborhood.

Walz mentioned that he spent about $100 on the project and that much of the work was done over the weekend.

Finding the ideal pole was the most complex part of the secret mission. To that end, the Bop Spotter creator said Washington Post wandered the streets of the Mission District for several hours until finding a chaotic place, where there was also free Wi-Fi and abundant sunshine.

Once he found the right spot, he climbed the stairs he had borrowed from a friend and left the box at the top of the pole. The system has been programmed to record 10 minutes of music and these are divided into 15 second portions, which are the ones that automatically go into Shazam.

After that, the application does its job: it scans the music captured on the street and recognizes it by name. Each of these songs is added to the playlist on the Bop Spotter site, although some of them are more difficult to recognize because of the noise from the street.

As the creator of Bop Spotter explained, one of the reasons he came up with this system is that he has been a frequent Shazam user for years.

“I look for Shazam songs all the time: at parties, on the street, in restaurants and stores. “When I hear a song in person and listen to it later, it reminds me of how I felt at that moment.” he told the Washington Post.

Then he started thinking it would be a good idea to have a Shazam 24/7, but in a fixed location, with the aim of seeing how music trends might change.

In recent years, several cities in the United States such as Chicago and San Francisco have resorted to ShotSpotter . It’s a system with microphones that identifies whether a sound corresponds to a gunshot where it came from and when it occurred, which is why it was used to support the work of police officers.

Walz mentioned that it was this system that inspired Bop Spotter: “It’s this, but for music. » That’s even where its name comes from.

“It’s cultural surveillance. Nobody notices it, nobody consents to it. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about capturing the vibrations. A constant stream of what’s happening in real time,” describes Walz.

The software engineer thought his device would only record around fifteen songs per day, but this figure was far exceeded: captures approximately 150 tracks per day.

In total, since Bop Spotter was installed at the end of September, more than 1,500 songs have been detected.

The playlist is varied, but has an obvious predominance of music in Spanish, particularly reggaeton. Some of the songs that have been captured in recent days are It’s a plan B secret , Selena’s Forbidden Love , Rauw Alejandro Clock And “Give Me to Life” by Evanescence .

From the Bop Spotter website they allow users to listen to the fragment captured on the street, although there is also the possibility of playing the original version on platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

The project so excited Walz that, on October 3, posted on his X account (formerly Twitter) who was looking for financing replicate it in 10 other cities around the world, such as Seattle, New York, London and Berlin . In just an hour he received the money. “It would be great to have a functioning network like this,” he told reporters.