A San Francisco mischief-maker known for staging citywide scavenger hunts involving hundreds of participants has a new conceptual art project in the Mission that eavesdrops on whatever music passersby happen to be playing.
Riley Walz took a smartphone — a “crappy Android” — and programmed it to do nothing but operate Shazam, the song-identification app, 24/7. He mounted the device to a pole, along with mini solar panels and a microphone pointed downward, where it picks up ambient music from the sidewalks and streets below. A companion website then logs the songs the device hears, along with a timestamp and the cellphone’s battery level.
It’s called “Bop Spotter,” a nod to ShotSpotter, the law-enforcement technology that uses sensors to identify illegal gunfire.
Walz (no relation to the vice presidential candidate) won’t reveal the device’s location or how high he placed it, except to say that he borrowed a ladder. Wherever Bop Spotter is, it’s a lively spot: People on Tuesday were listening to “HISS” by Megan Thee Stallion at 2:23 a.m. and “Friday” by Ice Cube at 6:54 a.m.
Scroll through the website, and you’ll get confirmation that people in the Mission listen to a lot of banda, as well as Kendrick Lamar and Selena — plus the occasional soft-rock banger by Hall & Oates.
Bop Spotter has identified more than 400 songs since Walz installed the rig Saturday. “I haven’t walked by it yet because I live a couple miles away, but it sends a ping every 10 minutes to a server to update the battery,” he said.
As proof that he’s not just a prankster making all this up, users on his site can click a song for a 20-second snippet of what the Android recorded. The audio quality is often poor, but it’s easy enough to make out, say, Freddie Mercury’s soaring falsetto on “I Want to Break Free” amid the ambient traffic noise.
While the project’s name sounds like a critique of police-state tactics, Walz insists that’s not the case — although he freely concedes that it’s a form of surveillance. (It could also prove useful to record company execs hungry for the next music trend arising from the streets.) As the Bop Spotter site states, “No one notices, no one consents. But it’s not about catching criminals. It’s about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time.”
Walz plans to keep the rig where it is until the Wi-Fi disconnects, a city worker removes it, or a roosting pigeon knocks a panel off. “Hopefully, it’ll be there for many years,” he said.
Aside from scrutinizing every busy intersection in the Mission, there’s one way to potentially find Bop Spotter’s location: Play a song on repeat and walk around the neighborhood, hoping the mic picks it up. Someone has done just that, using Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” the soundtrack to the internet’s enduring bait-and-switch gag.
“Some guy tweeted last night that he found where it was and played the Rick Roll song at 12:30 a.m.,” Walz said. “And it actually registered.”