Drumming Up the Links

Call quality on LinkNYC kiosks is generally very bad, and has actually gotten worse in recent months since CityBridge, the company that owns the kiosks, has decided to set a majority of the devices so the volume can only be turned up half way. I tried making calls from kiosks in noisy spots and found it absolutely impossible to hear anything coming out of the loudspeaker.

Still, it hasn’t stopped me from turning the tables and trying to capture the sounds of street noises and buskers if they happen to be loud enough and near enough to a kiosk that the devices might capture sounds of passable audio quality. So far I have only managed twice to get passable audio this way, with a memorable third opportunity erased by the fact that a kiosk’s tablet was not working. A preacher, standing right across the sidewalk from a LinkNYC kiosk, delivered his sermon through a megaphone. He was saying somewhat wacky stuff to get attention but mostly he was just preaching good old gospel of non-materialism and humility. On account of his megaphone the sound was good and loud and would easily have recorded well on the LinkNYC kiosk.

It would have been absolutely golden to capture that voice through the LinkNYC kiosk standing 5 or 6 feet in front of him but it was not to be. Like so LinkNYC kiosks the tablet simply did not work. This was obviously a harmless circumstance but imagine possible scenarios in which someone believes these devices are actually reliable for genuine emergencies only to find they don’t even work.

I caught these sounds on 4 separate LinkNYC kiosks as a drum corp, comprising about a dozen players, made its way around Times Square. At the end of this 4-minute piece you can hear people talking about the LinkNYC kiosks. It’s pretty rough sounding, as one should expect from these kiosks, but all in fun as I stroll about town, looking for other opportunities to do this.

I have, in fact, recorded hours of audio through the kiosks, but I am yet to process or organize most of it, and I probably never will. Some of what I hear can be alarming, as people standing nearby engage in full conversations unaware somebody is listening to them, and in some cases unaware that their voices are being heard over the loudspeakers of other kiosks in the area. This little surveillance game is less compelling now that call volume on most of the kiosks is so low, but when it works it is almost eerie. More on that later, I suppose. So much to do for this digital hoarder.