/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/3WKUOFRYCJERLGN6FZNWBGRPMA.jpg "Roni Bandini: An invention to silence reggaeton with artificial intelligence | Technology")
Roni Bandini woke up every day to reggaeton songs that his neighbor played at full volume. Until he mightn’t take it anymore. He did not knock on the door and ask his neighbor to turn down the volume, but instead developed an autonomous machine “to take care of the situation.” The Argentine musician and programmer manufactured a device that works with artificial intelligence (AI) to detect reggaeton and interfere with speakers bluetooth until the music stops. It’s called Reggaeton Be Gone and it’s inspired by the old TV-B-Gone, a device that was used 20 years ago to turn off annoying speakers and televisions in bars and restaurants. After making his invention public on social networks, Bandini is compared to Messi and Maradona in Argentina and for many other people he is now “a hero” and “deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize.”
The first step to create a machine capable of jamming the reggaeton signal is to train an AI to recognize the gender. Then, using a Linux computer, Bandini scans the signals bluetooth to determine which one may belong to the speaker that emits it. “From this point the machine is already busy.” Reggaeton Be Gone recognizes thousands of songs and once it identifies them, it generates inferences and counterattacks the speaker by sending many packets and connection requests in order to disconnect or deteriorate the sound quality. “For the machine to work, the volume of the neighbor’s reggaeton has to be high enough,” he explains.
Although some consider him a hero, the doubts that this program generates from an ethical and regulatory point of view are evident. In Spain it is illegal to possess and use any frequency jammer since June 2022. A jammer is a device designed to interfere with wireless communications signals such as Wi-Fi networks, GPS or bluetooth. They work by emitting radio signals at frequencies similar to those used by the targeted devices to cause interference and disruption, making it difficult or impossible for the targeted devices to receive or transmit signals. The use of these devices is prohibited in many countries, as they may have undesirable uses. It is common, for example, among criminals who try to disable alarm systems. In this regard, the programmer explains that his machine is different, since it does not block the frequencies, but instead floods the speaker’s requests. “Before you tell me anything regarding it, I understand that interfering with the speakers [bafles] from a neighbor might be illegal, but, on the other hand, listening to reggaeton every day at nine in the morning should definitely be illegal,” he says.
The project is controversial, but Bandini says that the reception has been “surprisingly affectionate and quite humorous.” He does not remember major criticism from reggaeton fans, “but it is also possible that they were lost in the avalanche of messages due to viralization,” he acknowledges. He has even received many custom orders for other musical styles. “To name a few: vallenato, Cordoba quartet and cumbia.” Despite the success, he explains that he has no long-term plans in the industry: “I am simply flattered by the attention and pleased by my small contribution to the interest in culture maker”, he details. The publication of his invention on X (formerly Twitter) has five million views.
After his program went viral, the Argentinean has posted the tutorial, demo and code and will offer workshops, workshops and conferences regarding it. “I downloaded songs representative of the style, converted them to mono, lowered the resolution to 16khz, made a split of 4 seconds, I used an MFE processing block and a sorting algorithm. Finally, I exported the trained model with an .eim extension for Linux under an ARM processor,” the inventor technically details in the video tutorial. To shape the device, use a Raspberry Pi 3 and a 128×32 Oled screen. Other Bandini inventions are Rayuelomatic, a machine designed to read Hopscotch, by Julio Cortazar; a Furby doll reprogrammed to recite phrases by Jorge Luis Borges whom he called Borgy; Klausner Machine, a device capable of “listening” to plants, and others published on his blog.