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.
That's the best part!
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
And my mind flew to Mogwai's "Punk Rock" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ5_0AMEDag)
The Game Boy dot-matrix display is the icing on the cake!
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!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.
The phone has 4,000mAh, too.
I know eBikes are a massive step up from laptop batteries (seemingly better for the density too somehow?)
This little no-name 185Wh battery pack is $40 right now with the 50% coupon code and would probably work great. (I picked one up recently for another project and it actually does deliver as advertised performance.)
>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 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.
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?
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.
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.
There are many worse violators than this, but it is what it is.
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).
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.
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.
If this were a restaurant, that would be a different story.
> 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...
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.
I never argued it was ethical. I think it is, but that wasn’t my argument.
Fixing this one installation wouldn't fix all the rest (example: Shot spotter)
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!
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".
12:36 AM Flores LATIN MAFIA
12:36 AM Never Gonna Give You Up Rick Astley
12:32 AM El F Natanael Cano & Junior H
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.
Large phased-array speaker on a stationary balloon platform above the city, capable of rapidly scanning and blasting every telephone pole in the neighborhood?
> As of 12:30am PST I have located the Box and successfully executed a Rickroll Injection Attack on the target system. Out of respect for the artist I will not be revealing the Box's location, but for any veteran Mission resident only a couple obvious locations exist.
Edit: There's clearly a bus stop right near the pole.
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.
Weird way to say "nepo kids."
There's 1,000,000+ Taylor Swifts and Drakes out there; connections and money are the true talent brokers.
Were they helped by having wealthy parents and breaking into the industry young? Certainly. Is that the whole story? Definitely not.
Just wanted to point out that everyone has different tastes and your stating as fact that they’re both talented is as valid as me stating as a fact that they’re both untalented.
Think of _every_ popular actor or artist. Do you think every one of them is talented? If so, it sounds like you’re basing your understanding of talent on what other people think.
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.
[1] It's hard actually, but this language diversity data(https://www.sf.gov/data/san-francisco-language-diversity-dat...) says there are ~20k speakers and this district population breakdown (https://www.sfgov.org/ccsfgsa/current-san-francisco-supervis...) says there are ~67k residents
(1985) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96mZc82fYGc
(2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOxkGD8qRB4
[what if, instead of having eighteenth century style parliament buildings with a bunch of old guys sitting at desks and speaking from time to time, we had political factions settle their disputes in-game on a battle royale level?]
Love this so much.
(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.)
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.
However, if you are hard of hearing to the point where you are actually disturbing others, I would recommend headphones.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMUDVMiITOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_IWlPHMziU
Other cultures seem to feel more entitled, thinking that THEIR music could not possibly bother anyone. I've certainly heard people blast Wagner or Orff at high volumes.
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.
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.
> At its core, turn down for what is a phrase used to promote having a good time. The phrase itself implies that there is no reason to turn down and stop partying.
Mine is firing directly upwards. I'm not trying to knock birds out of the sky.
A collogue:
Someone who sees their role on the team as to annoys others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You may enjoy China Miéville's The City & the City [1]. The less you read about it ex ante, the better. It's one of those books that gives you a mental model and language that proves surprisingly useful in describing what you saw.
This couldn't have been later than 2011, at which time the zeitgeist was replete with jabs at the ongoing gentrification. :)
[1]
Protesters Gather at Google Lawyer’s Apartments
https://missionlocal.org/2014/04/protesters-gather-at-google...
I thought it might have died because the site mentioned it is solar powered.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
Only if someone can move across the city in three minutes.
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.
walz, could you write more about the setup, maybe to propitiate others to replicate it in other cities?
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.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YVTnj3OIhwI
I found it especially insightful because he started from the beginning and traced the thought process as the algorithm developed and became more sophisticated.
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.
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...
I suspect moisture damage from Karl The Fog rolling in every afternoon is more likely to kill it.
The “Not Like Us” snippet (09/29 2:43pm) is easily recognizable though. And “Rockabye” can be heard at 3:05pm.
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.
the creativity in endeavors like these really just elicits total joy. it's infectious!
[edit: It would be awesome if others could collaborate on this and had a guide on how to do it!]
https://www.dechicchis.com/assets/Joseph-DeChicchis-Music-Id...
Like having a distinctive click impulse and get the cathedral from that.
But if you set up an autonomous recording device, no matter what you say you are doing, you will have problems.
I expectation is that the microphone above the rooftop will not pick up on normal conversations, only louder stuff.
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.
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.
https://microengineer.eu/2018/05/01/diy-night-clock-projecto...
Weather Station using LilyGo T-Display S3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VntDY9Mg7T0
https://github.com/goat-hill/bitclock
https://www.hackster.io/lmarzen/esp32-e-paper-weather-displa...
You're keeping charts, right? I wanna know what the top hit on that block is next month
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
BTW I'm curious what the solar setup is?
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.
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.
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?
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?
:chef’s kiss:
> 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
Cheers
I'm mildly annoyed at battery bars not completely filling the battery at 100%
2:05 AM - DM - Yailin la Mas Viral
2:03 AM - Nota - Yailin la Mas Viral
I'd like to see this rolled out widely so we can get some map of music.
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.
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.
> 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
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
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?
Love projects like 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?
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.
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.
The “use of a public pole” isn’t really the issue.
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.
The best way to get consent.
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.
"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....
All they need is enough metadata.
Everyone is trying to make reddit hot take comments with a sneer as they type it out.
Anyways. This is a cool website.
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?