cellphones boomboxing
Walking down the streets of urban metropol Europe I have noticed something a little different this summer than I am used to in the United States. That is personal soundsystems rocking public spaces again.
Having grown up with boomboxes as resistance culture, the past decade of the earbuds has been odd to me and a little boring. The isolation of the headphones, the personal disconnect with the local sonic ambiance interacting with your identity broadcast has just seemed no fun. Perhaps it is a more sensitive and polite community that keeps their sounds to themselves, but somehow it’s just not the same as the vibe of someone really enjoying their sounds and sharing it old school public boombox style. (I know it gets out of hand, it always does, that’s kinda the great thing, so finally laws like that of the MTA of NYC banning personal public sounds on the subways.)
Finally it seems public sounds are not just ringtones anymore, because the cellphone is coming of age in public social space. Though the music literally sounds like we are back to the transistor radio stage of tiny speaker squawkboxes, cellphones speakers are rocking the streets of Paris, Amsterdam, London, Barcelona etc. And it’s not just the kids. People are walking down the street, sitting on park benches, eating lunch, or just chilling with each other with their cellphones pumping out their jams. It’s so awesome. I will walk by someone and from their pocket or palm or hand or bag I can hear their soundtrack pulsing from their little phone speaker. Here on the streets of Paris is a mash of diversity of sounds from all over the world clashing with the boulevards.
I had a couple of thoughts about this. First, surely we will see the speaker quality advertised as a feature much the same way we see megapixels for the image quality of the digital camera on the phones. Second, hopefully we will have new sound apps that go beyond just playing music but create interactive opportunities with other users. This second idea is the most exciting to me and came to me as I sat at dinner with a bunch of friends trading music over Bluetooth and playing music through their phones for the dinner (putting the phone in an empty glass we found helped the amplification). What if my sounds and your sounds knew they were close enough in geo space to interact? For instance, what if our phones when close enough together could pick up on the same track and all play it so we have a larger soundsystem in sync? Or proximity would alter tracks you are playing, or your playlist would be affected by your geo location in space, etc. This trending area of how music will work in networked social space has a ton of potential. While most current sound apps like spotify and last.fm are really just new media jukeboxes with recommendation engines (awesome ones at that it must be said – america spotify is coming soon), when this is the age of the remix and open system, our apps need to do more than just shine up old analog tech. There are some interesting sound apps out there, such as my personal fav right now rjdj.me, but most are still limited to the single channel and not social. We are ready for the next level of open, social sound. Let’s play.
Keep your ears open America. The cellphone as this gen boombox is on. Turn it up.
