The Inhuman Microphone
The Inhuman Microphone
by Tom Hannen
http://vimeo.com/tomhannen/inhumanmic
This musichackday hack was inspired by Occupy Wallstreet's Human Microphone. Because megaphones are banned at the protests, one person shouts a message, then everyone else repeats it.
What Happens
Our hack circumvents the “no megaphones” rule. The protester shouts a message into their phone. It gets uploaded to a server. Then it gets sent to the other phones nearby. The phones are synchronised, and then they are all triggered to play the message back at the same time.
How it works
We created an iPhone app using Phonegap to record and upload the audio (the “protester” in the scenario above).
The playback of the audio happens in a simple web-page. You can use a Google Chrome on a laptop, or an iOS device (we didn’t have an Android device for testing). One issue was trying to get the audio in sync; network latencies meant that we couldn’t just fire the audio off as soon as the client received it - we have to “synchronise watches” as it were, so that they all trigger off at a given moment. This was achieved using Node, Socket.io, and some hack day time-sync-javascript-magic.
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