How The Heck Does Shazam Work? (An Interactive Exploration)
You're at a coffee shop. A song comes on. It's right on the tip of your tongue. You pull out your phone, tap a button, and it tells you what it is in a few seconds.How does a phone listen to a few seconds of music through a noisy room and instantly match it against millions of songs?
Your first instinct might be that the phone is listening to the melody or recognizing the lyrics. It's neither of those. What it's actually doing is far more clever.
How The Heck Does Shazam Work? (An Interactive Exploration)
Explore how Shazam and song identification work through interactive visualizations — spectrograms, constellation maps, hash fingerprints, and time-offset matching.perthirtysix.com
🐝bownage [they/he]
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •DreadPirateShawn
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •I've also noticed this is why Shazaam is shit even at a concert by the original band.
The link alludes to this when it talks about shazaam not handling us singing a song very well, but it strikes me as most stark when it's even the original artist.
Appoxo
in reply to DreadPirateShawn • • •Especially at more niche songs.
Kissaki
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •myfavouritename
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •Tim
in reply to alyaza [they/she] • • •That's brilliant, thank you!
They should cover JPEG compression at some point; when I first learned how that worked (at uni nearly 40 years ago... God) I was blown away by how beautiful that algorithm is.
Gumus
in reply to Tim • • •