Question for the Agora: How does Shazam work?
by Joshua • Dec 5th, 2008 at 8:59 pm • 7 comments
You have probably seen the iPhone commercial demonstrating the application called “Shazam.” If not, when you’re listening to a song you like, but you don’t know the name of, you open the application, play more of the song, the program identifies the song, and links you to the iTunes store to buy the song.
With most iPhone applications, it’s pretty easy to understand conceptually how the program works, but this one amazes me. Shazam is the perfect name. It’s like magic.
One buddy of mine is convinced it’s rigged to some international bar trivia league where members identify songs at all hours. How do you think they do it?
Comment by ari on 6 December 2008 at 12:50 am:
I also wondered the same thing and from what i can tell, it analyses the song and uses an acoustic fingerprint that it compares to a database to determine a match.
It could generate an acoustic fingerprint using any of the following well known audio features: Fourier coefficients, Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFFC), spectral flatness, sharpness, Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) coefficients and others. Also derived quantities such as derivatives, means and variances of audio features could be used. The extracted features are mapped into a more compact representation by using classification algorithms, such as Hidden Markov Models, or quantization…
Comment by Dennis on 29 December 2008 at 2:14 pm:
Thanks, that clears it up. Now for the theory of relativity…
Comment by bob on 31 December 2008 at 8:56 am:
There’s a paper on how Shazam works. More technical than I can comprehend, but interesting to see.
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
Comment by Steve on 6 January 2009 at 11:04 am:
Hey, thats really Interesting, how a Audio source is in fact a constellation, so does that mean that we could take a snap shot of what we see in space and translate it into what it sounds like.. the real sound of space?
Comment by Ahmed Roshdy on 22 July 2009 at 5:15 pm:
Hi,
Actually I found a very nice article explainign how does it work in a very simple way. Hereunder the link:
http://laplacian.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/how-shazam-works/
Ahmed
Comment by talhah on 22 September 2009 at 1:24 am:
@Steve that is a brilliant comment! The real sound of space. music for the next generation. I love it!!!
Comment by nnylw on 5 January 2010 at 5:52 am:
Dont bite off more than you can chew
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