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<article>
<h1>Distributed Speakers</h1>
<h4>(project idea)</h4>
<div class="important">
<p>So you want to have a rally. You want to hold a sports competition for your large neighborhood. Maybe you want to broadcast announcements across your company picnic. Maybe you want to throw an impromptu dance party!</p>
<p>The common line between all of these scenarios is this: you need a sound system, but you do not have one.</p>
</div>
<p>I first conceived of this while thinking about the specific issue of a dance party. Here's my solution:</p>
<ul>
<li>Everyone downloads this free app.</li>
<li>Everyone directs the app to the streaming media source of choice - a web radio station or something.</li>
<li>Each phone in the network listens to the audio it hears, and synchronizes what it's playing to the surroundings.</li>
</ul>
<p>I liked this idea because I have friends I like dancing with, but we rarely have a sound system set up and in place for dancing in public spaces. But anywhere you need to communicate something to a large number of people but you don't have a sound system, this app would be useful.</p>
<h3>Let's talk about issues.</h3>
<p class="important">How do you sync up a bunch of audio sources together on the fly, with limited communication between them?</p>
<p>That's the biggest problem, but there are smaller issues - well, they're really just the obstacles we'd need to face:</p>
<ul>
<li>How do we make this accept a wide variety of stream types - web radio, youtube, soundcloud, etc.?</li>
<li>How do you do ad hoc networking between mobile devices?</li>
<li>How do we tie this in with youtube playlists, which people will frequently want to play music from?</li>
<li>Is this even possible, when considering the speed-of-sound delay? How far apart can sources be, such that they're perceived as one sound rather than two?</li>
</ul>
</article>