Dance When There's Nothing But A Slow Glowing Dream

January 8, 2012 12:51 PM

How to DJ to a group of people with smartphones wearing headsets?

Here in Key West, our clubs are sad. Mostly cliche disco tracks, contemporary rap/country, or just bland club tracks. Compared to other important gay markets, our dance club opportunities are resoundingly flat and uninspiring. There is a notable absence of fun in the DJing. (Boat parties are welcome exceptions.)

SO rather than try and open a dance club, etc., the idea is to broadcast a *live* DJ to people with headsets and smartphones, and just occupy a space, flashmob-style. (There are loads of great and fun spaces.) Call it flashdance. Key West welcomes this sort of fun-having.

Turntable.fm seems like a possibility but it requires a Facebook or Twitter account. That's probably not a problem as presumably most of my friends who would participate would have 1) a smartphone and 2) either FB or twitter.

Just wondering. Are there other simple options? Am I overlooking or forgetting something? Key West used to be on the map for happening dance scene, hive mind, help up to get our groove back!

posted by humannaire to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Go the silent disco route and broadcast to an internet radio station station that people tune into?
posted by ellieBOA at 1:33 PM on January 8, 2012 [1 favorite]

That sounds awesome. I had the same thought as ellieBOA (except I didn't know it was a real thing).

Mostly I'm posting because your idea reminded me of a scene in Robin Sloan's Annabel Scheme book (see pages 14-15). The narrator follows a buzzing sound to a crowd of people:

Here and there, then everywhere, they were dialing numbers, switching their phones to speaker-phone mode and pushing them into the air like trophies.

The buzzing was coming from the phones. It was a low, rhythmic drone. At first you couldn't hear much, but apparently, if you put enough phones on speaker all at once, it starts to get loud.

Really loud.

So that was the trick: there was no speaker because the crowd was the speaker.
posted by chickenmagazine at 4:06 PM on January 8, 2012

Shoutcast?
posted by LogicalDash at 4:36 PM on January 8, 2012

Given the likely incompatible buffering of the music stream, the music is going to be out of sync (everyone hearing the downbeat at different times - or maybe even people hearing the bridge / drop at different times). One way to help mitigate this could be to have a wifi router and stream via icecast on wifi (maybe just DJ from a laptop and make an ad-hoc network?) with one direct hop to the stream rather than going through the cell phone networks you should get everybody closer to being in phase (though client buffering may still make a small difference).
posted by idiopath at 4:42 PM on January 8, 2012