Nate
Ever had a neighbor whose taste in music makes you question if silence is just a myth? Yeah, we’ve all been there. When earplugs failed and polite requests were ignored, Roni Bandini took things into his own tech-savvy hands. Imagine turning the tables on those endless reggaeton beats without even leaving your couch. Here’s how one man’s quest for peace turned into a Raspberry Pi-powered showdown.
He rigged a Raspberry Pi to mess with any reggaeton tunes by scrambling the sound on nearby Bluetooth speakers. Tech-savvy problem-solving at its finest.
The Raspberry Pi, a compact and affordable single-board computer, packs all essentials like a processor and memory onto one tiny circuit board. Using this nifty gadget, a guy crafted an AI device to detect reggaeton music and dial down the sound quality of speakers around him, all to escape his neighbor’s relentless tunes.
Roni used a USB microphone connected to his Raspberry Pi to detect the loud music.
Raspberry Pis are versatile microcomputers that can handle anything from coding education to being a desktop PC—and now, Roni’s personal noise control unit. He trained an AI on his Pi with a bunch of reggaeton tracks so it could recognize the genre. With a USB mic plugged into the Pi, he set up his tech to listen in and take action against his neighbor’s booming beats.
Upon recognizing reggaeton, the device makes the speaker’s sound mimic a broken radio.
Roni Bandini, a crafty maker and developer, leveraged two key pieces of software to tackle his loud music dilemma: the Raspberry Pi OS, acting as the Pi’s brain, and Edge Impulse for pattern recognition. In an interview with El Observador, he shared how his setup begins to jam a Bluetooth speaker once reggaeton is detected, turning the tunes into something akin to a busted radio. While his dream is to cut the speaker’s connection entirely, for now, he’s quite satisfied with just making the reggaeton unbearable enough for his neighbor to switch it off.
Roni’s “Reggaeton Be Gone” project stirred quite a mix of reactions. Created as an experimental hack, it walks a fine line with legality worldwide. Some see it as a humorous take on self-defense against noise pollution, while others criticize it for encouraging antisocial tactics.
Fans cheered for its inventiveness, with many hoping for versions targeting other music genres like hip-hop and country. Yet, amidst the laughs and approval, there’s concern this could lead to more harmful tech retaliations, hinting at a slippery slope from playful gadgets to outright vandalism tools.
The invention left quite a few folks skeptical.
