This old Android phone is living its best life listening to San Francisco from the top of a pole

What do you get when you combine an old Android smartphone, Shazam, a solar panel, and a street pole? If you said “the hottest social experiment this week,” you might be onto something.

Developer Riley Walz has cooked up a project he’s calling Bop Spotter. Deep in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, Walz has deployed his Bop Spotter hardware to listen in on the vibrant soundscape that the community generates, and try to identify what it’s hearing. He’s rigged up an Android phone to perpetually recharge itself with a solar panel, and its only other task is to run Spotify round-the-clock to recognize the tunes emanating from passing cars, boomboxes, and maybe even some particularly talented street performers.

Walz describes Bop Spotter as a tool to tap into tastes of a community:

This is culture surveillance. 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.

His hardware relays songs it’s detected back to Walz’s website, where you’ll be able to keep track of what it’s hearing 24/7. There are even some handy Spotify and Apple Music links so you can listen to its discoveries for yourself (what, no YouTube love?).

Walz talks about finding inspiration in ShotSpotter’s technology, which also uses microphones on street poles — except to localize gunfire in participating cities. This one’s probably a lot less useful for the cops, but its vibe is definitely a lot more chill.