I love this project, the Bop Spotter! This is my neighborhood and I love its musical landscape.
Sometimes I add to it myself from a bluetooth speaker on my wheelchair, but more often I’m surreptitiously shazaming the music around me from others’ speakers, from cars, from businesses I’m going by on the sidewalk.
This is a cool use of a old/low end phone – hooking it up to a little solar panel on a utility pole. The web page shows the community’s culture to the community. It’s community data collection that’s positive, approachable, and fun. We are also invited to listen along on Apple Music or Spotify!
You could expand this project out in different ways, like log all the music, make it searchable, count the times we hear particular songs or artists, make it possible to, in the future, reconstruct the public musical soundscape of this corner!
It’s beautiful just as it is of course, but I get kind of excited about the archival aspect of communicating with the future!
Muni bus brakes complement “God Bless the USA,” so nicely, since that bus no doubt has a wee US flag by the door (per the requirements of FTA purchasing).
I love everything about this post! I’ve been meaning to ask more folks about how they listen to music, and how they hear new music, so this is a delightful answer to questions I haven’t asked yet 💖