Where I’m At is a sonic graffiti app that tags locations with audio. I’ve been working on it, and I’m currently getting nearby locations with Foursquare, saving audio files to my remote server.
Every location has only the most recent audio file associated with it, so there is some competition to tag the place with your sound. Like if you’re a graffiti artist and your work gets painted over. Maybe there can be a way to access history, but it will be an advanced feature.
To do list:
- Ability to pull in audiofiles from the server, and data from the database (so far I’m just posting to it).
- Visualize the nearby locations on a map with pins representing recent audio.
- User logins (optional) will get contacts and create a list of friends who you can follow, in addition to browsing by what’s around you.
- Send push notification when you’re nearby a sound somebody has left.
- Hold up phone to your ear to hear a random recording, walkie talkie style, of a sound from nearby. Like WeChat or ChitChat. So when you get a push notification you can listen privately without plugging in headphones, or broadcast it.
- Recognize if music is playing and/or tag songs via Spotify API… I wonder if I should focus more about tagging/listening to recorded music, less on recording/sharing audio?
- What should the visual language be for an audio app?
- How do I find the closest sounds for any given location? In the long run, I would need a better data structure, because I’d want to be able quickly search just for the locations that are nearby, and prepare their corresponding audio.
- How can I visualize the frequency spectrum as audio is being recording/played back? The Media API doesn’t provide access but I’d like to figure this out.
More importantly, how would people want to use this? I’m still researching location-based audio, and I’d like to focus on one aspect that will help me make decisions about what to do next, how to prioritize features, the visual design etc.
1. This could be for sharing audio recordings with strangers and/or friends. I’ve been looking at Chit Chat for inspiration.
2. This could be for sharing location-based music – it tags music that’s playing like Shazam or lets you seach for a song and share it with your location. Example: Soundtracking.
3. If this was an app for creating and publishing site-specific Audio Tours, I could do both those things, and might have a clearer picture of who would use this. There would be tour guides, and tourists. It could allow users to trigger songs, or audio recordings, and might also need to orient based on the compass. There are already some apps for this, like toursphere, locacious and locatify.