[HN Gopher] Shazam Turns 20
___________________________________________________________________
Shazam Turns 20
Author : feross
Score : 276 points
Date : 2022-08-19 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| atlas_shrugged wrote:
| Ive always wondered why there is only 1 shazam. I was under the
| impression the algorithm/patent was just licensed from another
| company. Why havent people cloned this app? Also why arent the
| shazam geo charts more detailed ie by city/neighborhood or
| location. Would love to see what songs djs are playing at a
| location even if im not there. Right now the geo charts are very
| high level (only major cities)
| zekica wrote:
| https://musicbrainz.org/ existed at least from 2003, and it
| does a similar, although a less impressive job.
|
| There are other apps such as SoundHound, and even some virtual
| assistants have the same feature.
| piperswe wrote:
| The actual audio fingerprinting/music identification project
| associated with MusicBrainz is AcoustID
| (https://acoustid.org/). It's a separate project that happens
| to be well integrated with MusicBrainz.
| cannam wrote:
| The Shazam algorithm was genuinely novel and invented by one of
| their founders. They patented it to great effect.
| FabHK wrote:
| I used to use _Soundhound_ (used to be Midomi), until Shazam
| was integrated into iOS.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundHound
| dominotw wrote:
| i feel old.
| scarface74 wrote:
| What really surprises me is that years after the Apple
| acquisition that there is still the option to "open in Spotify"
| on the app.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| It's crazy they even mentioned Shazam in a PR because it will be
| folded into Siri at some point and disappear.
| hackmiester wrote:
| It is already folded into Siri. That's what happens if you ask
| "What song is this?" It just shows you the answer with the
| Shazam branding.
|
| edit to add: I only know this so well because, when I switched
| to iPhone in 2016, I was REALLY confused about how you Shazam
| something. I couldn't find it in the App Store. I tried to use
| the Google app, since that's how I did the equivalent thing on
| Android, but it didn't support it. Finally I figured out that
| it's just built into Siri.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Oh I know it's included, by folded in I mean it's going to be
| completely removed as an additional app and the branding will
| disappear. It's just going to be a feature of Siri and
| nothing more at some point.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Apple acquired Siri from another company and kept the name.
| I doubt that they will kill the 20 year old Shazam brand.
| In fact on the control center, the Shazam icon is very
| prominent and it's available as a complication on the
| watch.
| scarface74 wrote:
| IIRC, Shazam was on the App Store since it's inception in
| 2008.
| cannam wrote:
| It's obviously a cracking algorithm, but what made Shazam doubly
| remarkable was how efficiently they turned it into a working
| product.
|
| It wasn't _just_ a case of developing an algorithm that could in
| theory be used to match an audio signal against all the world 's
| pop songs. They presumably also had to get hold of a substantial
| number of those songs, fingerprint them, and roll out the search
| robustly against generally very poor audio hardware using simple
| telephony services at (for the time) quite considerable scale.
| They did it very quickly, it worked super well from launch, and
| it's been running continuously ever since.
|
| I've read the paper about the method, but I would love to know
| more about the original development and deployment.
| mkarliner wrote:
| Well, I was CTO at the time, AMA...
| [deleted]
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| How'd y'all monetise back then?
| schoen wrote:
| How did you get the underlying corpus of audio for all
| commercially recorded music?
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I have the same question. Did you make deals with the major
| record labels? Did they ship you DVDs (or God forbid CDs)
| full of songs or something?
| jaredsohn wrote:
| Or just collect mp3s? I'm guessing that at least happened
| while prototyping. And it seems like the most efficient
| way to make the service work in that era so it wouldn't
| surprise me if that data got used in production initially
| while handling licensing concerns separately.
| harmmonica wrote:
| Tangent, and this may be one of those cases where I learned about
| this _on_ HN and am now passing it back to HN so pardon if I 'm
| just late to the party, but if you're a regular Shazam user on
| iPhone you don't need to open the app anymore. You can just add a
| widget to control center. https://support.apple.com/en-
| us/HT210331
| joezydeco wrote:
| Saying "Hey Siri what song is this?" is even quicker.
| muziq wrote:
| Yeah, I've spent five minutes scrolling a thread before
| someone says the obvious... Cepstrum for the win ;)
| nicofcurti wrote:
| I agree with the other folks here, Shazam is one of those things
| that still works just fine and I have no fucking clue on how they
| do it. What do they compare the audio recorded with?
| duped wrote:
| They "fingerprint" the audio and then compare the fingerprint
| to a large corpus. The hard part is fingerprinting that is
| resilient to noise (and position within a track!) and a fast
| way to search the corpus of known fingerprints.
| spaceheater wrote:
| Shouldn't their patent expire soon? I remember them actively
| issuing cease and desist letters to anyone who made code
| tutorials about how their algo works.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9594480
| ksala_ wrote:
| Shazam always blows my mind. It doesn't work 100% of the times,
| but when it does it feels like magic. On top of that they
| introduced (I don't know exactly when) the feature to see lyrics
| for the song which are automatically synched with the music. This
| is also mind-blowing.
|
| Only Google has managed to top Shazam in blowing my mind, and
| only ~recently, by making this whole process happen completely
| offline and continuously in the background on a phone. It's not
| as broad but still incredible. Google's paper:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10958
| umaar wrote:
| I used to work at Shazam as a front-end web developer and they
| really supported me. Going to conferences, hackdays (20% time),
| being exposed to real production-grade systems, it was great.
| Very grateful to have worked there.
|
| Wrote about it too: https://umaar.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-
| working-at-shaza...
| IshKebab wrote:
| How on earth have they survived so long when their core feature
| was cloned by Google and Apple years ago?
| doodlesdev wrote:
| Apple acquired Shazam in 2018 [1] there is no Apple
| alternative because Shazam IS what Apple uses.
|
| [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/09/apple-acquires-
| shazam...
| spinningarrow wrote:
| Not Shazam but I remember a website back in the day called 'The
| Song Tapper' where you could press your space bar to the rhythm
| of a song in your head and it would suggest which song(s) it
| might be. Teenage me thought that was very cool.
|
| The site seems no more but I found a Lifehacker post about it:
| https://lifehacker.com/find-the-name-of-a-song-by-tapping-14...
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I wish they would expand the ACR into movies and TV. Would be
| awesome to Shazam a show/movie and get details, like X-Ray does.
| kippinitreal wrote:
| I too have always been blown away by Shazam and pondered how it
| could possible index so much content for fast lookups. A few
| years ago this article was super helpful in helping me understand
| and learn a lot. Fun read which required a lot of side googling
| for me http://coding-geek.com/how-shazam-works/
| msoad wrote:
| Shazam loads so freaking fast and ready to listen on my iPhone I
| really want to read an article on how they did it. It loads as
| fast as an empty hello world app but the button is ready to press
| and listen!
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sadly, that is not my experience with the app. I would equate
| the time my Shazam loads and is ready to listen as roughly the
| same amount of forever that it takes to launch the native
| camera app and being able to take a picture.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| You can add it to Control Centre and it's seemingly instant,
| just starts listening as soon as you press the button.
| jimjambw wrote:
| I'm a massive fan of Shazam in Control Centre. It let me
| have space for another app on the home screen, and they
| also sync with the iOS app now too.
| dylan604 wrote:
| interesting. i've never messed with these options.
| Jackpillar wrote:
| yarabarla wrote:
| Only problem with that is that it doesn't save the results
| in your list of Shazam'd songs.
| beermonster wrote:
| Try long pressing to see history.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| There's also a button in the iPhone control center. No need to
| even unlock your phone, just swipe down from the top-right!
| duped wrote:
| The paper giving an overview of how shazam works (1) is one of my
| favorites
|
| (1) https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
| xtracto wrote:
| Reminds me a lot of MusicBrainz Tagger, I remember being
| fascinated by it in 2001 (
| https://web.archive.org/web/20010107213100/http://musicbrain...
| ) because it was able to "identify" the song in the mp3/wma/ogg
| file and download the correct tags.
| rmnclmnt wrote:
| I remember studying this paper as a student, was completely
| amazing, a bit mysterious and not so difficult to understand at
| the same time.
|
| And most of all: no ML involved! All hail the heuristics!
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Shazam is one of the very few apps in the past 20 years that
| STILL "wows" me. I have no idea how the tech works, and I even
| sort of like not knowing, to be honest. It's one of the very few
| apps out there that still in exist in a "magical" way to me. I am
| constantly impressed with how fast/easy it works, even with very
| obscure music. What an amazing app.
|
| Fun quick related story, about 10 or more years ago there was a
| back tracking song on a TV show (Scrubs) that I really liked that
| was only in the Netflix version. It was just an instrumental song
| with some French sounding words speaking in it so there was no
| easy way to search for it. However, it was distinct enough that
| it didn't seem like something made just for the show. It was also
| pretty quiet and under some talking in the tv show scene. I had
| posted on reddit asking if anyone knew it, and never got any
| responses. I searched all over the web, but no source had the
| track details. It drove me crazy every time I would hear the song
| in re-watching the show, and I still could not track it down
| every few years when I tried again. Back then, Shazam had no
| cataloging of it so it wasn't in there either yet. However, when
| re-watching it a few years back again, I tried Shazam again and
| to my surprise it finally worked. I was blown away that Shazam
| was finally able to solve this 10+ year mystery. It was one of
| the coolest feelings every to scratch that itch finding this rare
| French song and hearing it in full. It was truly magical.
|
| EDIT: Oh sorry, I didn't think anyone would actually care about
| the song itself lol It was called "Sans Hesitation" by the
| French-Canadian band "Chapeaumelon".
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju4d3YQhByU - It's also
| interesting cause now the song does in the episode in tv music
| database sites. Very cool.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| And now Chapeaumelon is wondering why the sudden surge of the
| youtube views. Comments are disabled so we cannot even help
| them to understand :)
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| which episode? and is it still in there? DVD, streaming, and
| syndication have some different songs because of rights issues.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| https://scrubs.fandom.com/wiki/My_Ocardial_Infarction - In
| the Netflix version. It does now show the song in there,
| which is cool. But for like 10 years, it was unknown.
| nemo1618 wrote:
| You can't just post a story like that and not link the song!
|
| Personally, my main usage of Shazam is for identifying
| vaporwave samples. Often all you have to do is throw the song
| in Audacity, tweak the speed a bit, and Shazam it.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| haha Sorry, I updated the post. Didn't think anyone would
| care about that part lol
| actionfromafar wrote:
| There are entire albums on Spotify which are full songs of
| 80s pop classics, played at a slower speed, then uploaded as
| a new album from another artist.
| neon_electro wrote:
| Highly recommend WhoSampled to help you track down samples
| where possible:
|
| 1. https://www.whosampled.com/Washed-Out/Feel-It-All-Around/
| 2. https://www.whosampled.com/Macintosh-
| Plus/%E3%83%AA%E3%82%B5... 3.
| https://www.whosampled.com/song-tag/Vaporwave/
| muizelaar wrote:
| This paper from the Shazam founder describes an approach for
| doing it:
| https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
| kleiba wrote:
| _from the Shazam founder_
|
| ...who by the way holds a PhD from Stanford...
| caseyf7 wrote:
| Shazam is probably the only Apple watch app I ever use. Very
| convenient to have this on the watch.
| terramex wrote:
| Shazam is great but a similar app that really "wowed" me around
| 2007 was Midomi - it could recognise humming with good results,
| even though I'm really bad at hitting right notes and key. It
| still exist but is not really talked about anymore, Shazam
| seems to have dominated that market.
| turkeygizzard wrote:
| Don't want to spoil it for you if you really don't want to know
| but I want to share to others in case they do because I found
| it so interesting when I first learned!
|
| It looks like others shared the paper:
| https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
|
| It's short but very cool. I read it a while ago and honestly
| can't pretend I fully grokked everything, but my understanding
| was that you can't just use a Fourier transformation alone.
| Noise would basically make this impossible.
|
| So what I'd consider the key insight is that they compressed
| songs down to "fingerprints". IIRC they noticed that songs,
| even in noisy environments, preserved certain bits of
| information. Particularly, they could look at the spectrogram
| and see peaks of amplitude in the tapestry. They essentially
| set some radius and scanned the spectrogram. In a given radius,
| only the largest amplitude value in time and frequency would be
| preserved. So you've reduce a 3MB song to several bits.
|
| This would be good enough for small databases (I think). But
| it's intractable for anything practical. So they built hashes
| out of these fingerprints using pairs of the preserved peak
| bits. They would choose a certain peak (called the anchor
| point), record its time offset from the start of the song, and
| then form pairs with other nearby peaks, saving the pairs of
| frequencies (but discarding e.g their amplitudes). So for each
| of these anchor points, you would get a 64 bit value: 32 bits
| for the time offset and track ID and 32 bits of frequency-
| pairs.
|
| When you wanted to look up a song, they would fingerprint your
| snippet into multiple 32bit hashes and compare them against the
| frequency-pair hashes in the database. If a song was a good
| match, then you would see that your snippet matched against
| multiple hashes from that song, and specifically they matched
| linearly over time (I'm struggling to explain this bit but it's
| visually obvious if you look at Figure 3 in the paper).
|
| I probably got some of this wrong, but I hope it's a helpful
| summary of the paper. I remember struggling to understand parts
| of it, so please let me know if anything I said is egregiously
| wrong!
| cooperadymas wrote:
| Well?
| robbyking wrote:
| The first time I heard of Shazam was on a road trip with a
| friend of mine who had minimal tech skills at best. I was
| already 10 years into my career as an engineer, and when he
| told me about it, I honestly didn't believe him; I was positive
| he was mistaken, and speculated it was a service similar to
| Aardvark[1], which was a peer-to-peer information engine.
|
| I was wrong, of course, Shazam really did live up to its hype.
| I think it's interesting that the someone knows about how a
| technology works the more sceptical they are of what it is
| capable of.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)
| [deleted]
| adnanaga wrote:
| What was the song ??
| sexy_panda wrote:
| You will get the result once $commenter is online again
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Updated the post, sorry! haha
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I have no idea how the tech works
|
| It does a Fourier analysis of sections of the song, and puts
| the results in a database. A Fourier analysis yields what
| frequencies make up a waveform along with their amplitudes, so
| it is very compact.
| duped wrote:
| Taking the DTFT of a signal yields exactly the same amount of
| information, so it's not really more compact. Shazam used a
| spectrogram (which is more information than the original
| signal) and searched for peaks to create a finger print.
|
| It's not the analysis that is compact, but the fingerprint
| derived from it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I know it contains the same information, but it makes it
| easy to discard the low amplitude frequencies, and the
| frequencies that are not heard by the ears, or are not
| particularly important to our ears.
| quantumduck wrote:
| Shazam used to wow me, but then as others mentioned in the
| replies it's essentially matching the signature of the sound to
| the sounds in the database. If it's one of the song, it gets
| matched fairly quickly.
|
| Wow blew my mind was when Google introduced 'hum and we'll
| recognize the song for you' in Google assistant:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/products/search/hum...
|
| It works so well even with my shitty humming - even my
| girlfriend can't recognize what the song is but Google can. It
| doesn't even have the same signature as the original audio
| file, just similar hums in a noisy environment and it still
| works. Black magic fuckery.
| thehappypm wrote:
| What is a signature? How is a signature computed from a noisy
| audio stream, over a mall speaker? How is a signature
| computed from an arbitrary starting point?
| turbohz wrote:
| The closest to the ideal signature?
| pfarrell wrote:
| IIRC, it's uses a Fast Fourier Transform of the time delay
| between high notes in the song to generate a series of
| "hashes" that are stored a db. Those ids can be calculated
| locally on the phone and then its a simple db lookup to
| retrieve potential hits. When Shazam adds a song to the db,
| they compute a series of "hashes" so you can identify at
| any point in the tune.
| daed wrote:
| https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
| jakereps wrote:
| > Wow blew my mind was when Google introduced 'hum and we'll
| recognize the song for you' in Google assistant
|
| Their announcement actually made me roll my eyes a bit, as
| Soundhound had that functionality nearly a decade before. I
| had both SH and Shazam installed on my old phone for these
| usecases - now Shazam is baked into Siri so I don't even have
| the app itself installed.
| ml_basics wrote:
| How well does Shazam work for you when you hum or sing a
| song?
| macrolime wrote:
| Doesn't work at all
| jakereps wrote:
| I haven't tried humming with Shazam recently, but I don't
| think it worked well back when I did have the actual app.
| It works very well for music though. I used it around
| five times, just this Wednesday night at a concert, and
| it got every track for me.
|
| Soundhound is what had humming "support" explicitly in
| its product description, and it worked pretty well from
| what I remember. It's been long enough though that I may
| only be remembering the times it worked.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| What do you have to ask Siri to get this to work?
| ValG wrote:
| "Hey Siri, what song is this" works
| nmarinov wrote:
| I usually say "Hey Siri, what song am I listening to?"
| but it works with a bunch of variations e.g.: "what song
| is this?"
|
| There's also a bunch of other options to trigger Shazam,
| main way I use it is from the Control Center:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210331
| bobthepanda wrote:
| If you have an Apple Watch, you can also set it as a home
| screen button, which is a lot more discreet in public.
| _Microft wrote:
| If you prefer to access it via your iPhone's control
| center, you can configure it that way in the control
| center settings. It is called "Music Recognition" there.
| baxtr wrote:
| I need to download the Google app (and I presume sign in) to
| use that feature? Count me out
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| I enjoy salsa dancing, but I don't know any Spanish, so I use
| that built-in Google functionality to hum various songs all
| the time to figure out what they're called.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| Dude, spoiler alert. Did you miss the part where OP said they
| liked not knowing how it works??
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I don't know about Shazam's current algorithm specifically, but
| years ago I worked at a place with a mathematician that worked
| on gracenote's algorithms, and asked him for the basics on how
| it works.
|
| Basically, it records audio chopping it up into small segments
| and throwing them through a FFT. Then it takes that, and
| thinking of the data like a greyscale spectrograph image, runs
| it through a quantization filter that helps reject some noise,
| then converts that to locality sensitive hashes that are sent
| to the server. So basically FFT, filter, hash, lookup.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's all just Fourier analysis I'm guessing?
|
| Which I always find to be simultaneously simple and obvious as
| well as total magic.
| goldcd wrote:
| I think all (so simple) you have to do is parse all the tracks
| ever made, and say generate a sequence of snapshots of what the
| tune sounds like and the delta. e.g. if it was notes (for
| simplicity) E,D,C,D,E,E,E,D,D,D,E,E,E is the start of "Mary had
| a little Lamb" Millions of tracks contain the note E. Many
| hundreds of thousands probably have the note D next - and as
| you work through the sequence, you're pruning down that list
| until you who what it is. Bit that makes my mind hurt though,
| is the data-structure you put those sequences into to make it
| quickly searchable. Users can start recording at any point in
| the song - so you can't just prune a tree down from a known
| starting point. There's going be be background nose - so you
| need some way of "when you have no choice left", I presume
| sticking wild-cards into the previous decisions, to see if you
| end up back on a known track.
|
| Yeah - I think it's magic as well.
|
| Other thoughts: I used it back in the UK when it launched, and
| the first track I ever used it on dialling (2580 - the numbers
| down the middle of your keypad) was also a French track (MC
| Solaar - La Vie Est Belle)
|
| I always felt they missed a trick, just identifying music (and
| then trying to sell you stuff). Surely they could have used the
| same tech to seamlessly mix all music together. (i.e. take the
| sequences within tracks they find hard to differentiate, and
| then use these points to allow two tracks to be mixed
| together). What's the minimum number of tracks it would say
| take to seamlessly mix from Megadeth to Mozart?
| zelos wrote:
| They used to have a paper on their website describing their
| algorithm in simplified form but I can't find it any more.
| Wikipedia has some details:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint
|
| I believe it's very sensitive to changes in timing, so it
| doesn't work on live performances etc.
|
| (based on reading I did 13 years ago before an interview at
| Shazam, which to this day still remains my worst interview
| performance)
| muizelaar wrote:
| This paper perhaps?
| https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
| neon_electro wrote:
| The "doesn't work with live performances" bit is borne out
| by my consistent experience failing to identify _some_
| songs at live performances, but with the "DJ Set" form of
| live performance, tempo shifting music without pitch
| shifting it still appears to get the goods more often than
| not.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| I'll also plug AcoustID from MusicBrainz
|
| https://musicbrainz.org/doc/AcoustID
| senko wrote:
| We use AcoustID in MusicBox[0] to identify and
| deduplicate content, and it works great for us.
|
| What we do is calculate the acoustic fingerprint of every
| uploaded content and compare/check for duplicates (only
| authorized staff can upload, but this still helps a bunch
| with user errors and in cases where you need to reupload
| a track). Then we compare the fingerprints, using this[1]
| approach, so we can fine-tune the similarity based on our
| needs.
|
| In our case it's been very effective. Yes, live versions
| are treated as different ones (which is exactly what we
| need in our case, so it's a feature for us), but
| mechanical differences between tracks (volume, slight
| distortions from codec, different compression levels or
| remasters, or track being cut differently) are just
| ignored.
|
| If you ever want/need audio fingerprinting, I can warmly
| recommend it.
|
| [0] Music streaming service optimized for cafes,
| restaurants and other venues - https://musicbox.com.hr/
| [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/acoustid/Uq_ASj
| aq3bw/k...
| jefftk wrote:
| _> live versions are treated as different ones_
|
| I think you're talking about a live recording vs a studio
| recording? But what I think zelos was talking about was
| "someone is currently playing music live, what is it?",
| which is a lot harder because you need to recognize the
| essence of a song and not the essence of a recording of a
| song.
| senko wrote:
| Yeah, agreed, that's way harder and not something
| AcoustID can do.
| bambataa wrote:
| Shazam as a product feels a bit odd. Almost as if they've
| never quite outgrown their slightly sketchy "advertised on
| MTV2 alongside the Crazy Frog" origins.
|
| They must have loads of data on songs people actually want to
| know yet never really managed to turn themselves into
| anything more sophisticated.
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| > Surely they could have used the same tech to seamlessly mix
| all music together. (i.e. take the sequences within tracks
| they find hard to differentiate, and then use these points to
| allow two tracks to be mixed together). What's the minimum
| number of tracks it would say take to seamlessly mix from
| Megadeth to Mozart?
|
| I noodled around with this idea in my free time a few years
| ago, got absolutely nowhere really usable with it (I probably
| put in a couple hundred hours).
|
| I knew I was limited by my dataset (small), code quality
| (terrible) and understanding of musical theory (virtually
| nil).
|
| Maybe I'll pick up that idea again - even doing beat matching
| would be kind of neat.
| saghm wrote:
| My instinct is that it probably isn't as simple as you
| describe because not only are there multiple notes at a time
| in a given track (i.e. chords), but there are also several
| tracks playing at once! It's possible that they're literally
| generating data like {guitar 1: C chord, guitar 2: single
| note E, bass: single note E} for every point in time, but
| even then each instrument isn't playing the exact same rhythm
| most of the time, so the notes won't exactly line up. I guess
| I don't think it's completely computationally infeasible to
| do it this way, but it seems more likely that they're just
| trying to separate the music from the background noise and
| then try to find the closest match to the music audio as a
| whole rather than trying to separate it into component.
| xhevahir wrote:
| >if it was notes (for simplicity) E,D,C,D,E,E,E,D,D,D,E,E,E
| is the start of "Mary had a little Lamb"
|
| As far as I can tell these operate on audio, not symbolic
| music.
| plussed_reader wrote:
| FFT data tends to get quantized, normalized, and counted
| for analysis purposes.
| babypuncher wrote:
| What really wows me is that Shazam started in 2002. It was a
| phone number you would call on your cell phone and let it
| listen to your environment.
|
| Way back then, it was doing everything you describe, but over
| low quality band limited telephone lines.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| I remember Sony Ericsson handhelds all came with TrackID back
| in the day (2007/2008) and I used it to name music I heard in
| public. It was the same idea. I think it charged PS1-2 per
| track!
| ipaddr wrote:
| Back then phone quality was much better. Cellphones killed
| that.
| martyvis wrote:
| What? HD Voice using VoLTE or WiFi Calling is miles better
| than any land line phone
| swores wrote:
| As an almost teenager at the time, that (Shazam over the
| phone with an answer texted back - which I used on a Nokia
| 3310) was the one thing that convinced me we would soon have
| pocket devices that really could do anything.
|
| And while it took a few iterations (for me, from palm pilot
| to blackberry as a teenager, then eventually moving to iPhone
| after a few too many painful Blackberry upgrades - still
| missing that unified inbox though, as is everyone else I know
| who had a BB of that era... and frankly missing a great
| physical keyboard on a phone, too) I still am impressed on a
| daily basis that I do indeed have the device in my pocket
| that 12 year old me dreamed of.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I didn't know it ever worked that way, that's incredible.
| Reminds me of ChaCha, the texting service where you texted
| questions and a human would quickly look up the answer and
| text it back. It's a very cool idea that was quickly
| outmoded by smart phones and is kind of lost to history
| now.
| oDot wrote:
| Don't skip the credits next time :)
| bluetidepro wrote:
| haha wasn't in there! Def lookied :)
| LargeWu wrote:
| It's only been 20 years since Sinbad starred in this movie? I
| would have guessed closer to 30.
| chirau wrote:
| This paper of how their algorithm works by one of their lead
| developers at the time suggests that the company actually started
| in 2000.
|
| https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
| rwmj wrote:
| I turned them down after an interview in around 2000/2001 (they
| started out in London). The reason was that the idea seemed
| completely useless to me and I thought they'd never make a
| business out of it :-)
| cannam wrote:
| That's interesting - I had a vague recollection of having
| heard of them before launch - I guess they were hiring from
| the pool of developers being laid off from the dotcom bust?
|
| I have an image in my mind of my boss at the time going
| around the office asking if anyone was interested in talking
| to this thing called Shazam. I've long wondered if I imagined
| it. I certainly didn't act on it.
|
| I remember (not much later than this) interviewing at a place
| where the product was intended to be "an automated assistant
| that listens to your phone call and pipes supporting
| information to your computer as you speak". Obviously I gave
| them a wide berth. It's funny to think about the "gap" in
| magic - Shazam seems magical but totally worked, this other
| idea seemed magical and, at the time, totally was.
| rwmj wrote:
| I checked my email and the interview was actually in mid
| March 2002, not 2000/2001. I think still just before they
| did the initial launch of the premium phone service. Here's
| the job spec:
|
| _> Role: Senior software engineer - Low Level Device ,
| Distributed Communications Role mission: To ensure that
| Shazam 's subsystems are integrated and interface
| effectively and efficiently with external partners'
| systems/hosting environments, yielding available, robust
| and scalable full offerings. Key Performance Areas: 1.
| Design real time software using standard techniques and
| protocols, to be scalable, maintainable and robust 2.
| Manage & collaborate within and between team(s) 3.
| Implement quality software solutions within budget 4.
| Ensures that design and implementation of software is of
| high quality 5. Ensures that all deliverables are
| documented Required Skills/Capabilities <B7> Knowledge of
| interfacing peripheral and devices to Linux <B7> Knowledge
| of Linux device drivers a plus. <B7> Distributed messaging
| techniques and protocols, eg: PVM, MPI <B7> Ability to
| grasp and work with abstract concepts <B7> Familiar with
| current software engineering methodologies e.g. RUP, XP
| <B7> Understands and is able to manage quality assurance
| e.g., module tests, code review Required Knowledge/Previous
| Key Experience <B7> At least 4 years of full-time software
| engineering within a team of at least 3 sofware engineers.
| <B7> Must have been involved in all phases of the software
| cycle from requirements engineering to launch. <B7> Must
| have developed low level device or communications software
| <B7> Experience with Computer telephony a big plus <B7>
| Experience with a high-growth startup environment a plus
| Ideal Qualifications Ideally University degree in Computer
| Science (alternatively at least 4 years of proven software
| engineering experience). Please forward your CV/resume',
| with cover e-mail, including full details of your earnings
| expectations, to recruit <at> shazamteam.com_
| saasxyz wrote:
| Just read this paper, it is brilliant. And TIL about Shazam
| and the idea still sounds useless to me. Seems like I have
| never had this problem in my life.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| Do you like music? If so have you really never heard a song
| playing somewhere that you did not recognize and wanted to
| know what it was?
| khazhoux wrote:
| I use it several times a week. Driving with classical
| station on. Is this Mozart? That cadence sounded like
| Mozart, but I'm not sure. <Shazam and wait 10 seconds> Oh,
| it's _Brahms_! And now I have it auto-saved to listen to
| when I get home.
| astrange wrote:
| Don't use your phone while you're driving!
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Shazam is an amazing piece of tech. Always amazed me when you use
| it in a noisy bar, and it finds the right track instantly.
|
| One used to be able to sing the songs as well which does not seem
| to work anymore. Either that or my vocals are gone.
| jmfldn wrote:
| In the pre-app world I would call Shazam on my mobile when out in
| clubs quite often. They were way ahead of the curve. Amazing
| company.
| 0xdeadbeee wrote:
| Way before apps were even a thing, around 2002-2004, I lived in
| the UK and shazam worked as calling service: you'd call 2580 (top
| to bottom on the center column of a phone numpad), it would
| listen for 30s, then would hang up and send you an sms with the
| name of the song. IIRC it would charge you something like 50p if
| it found a result.
|
| It really felt like pure magic!
| nibbleshifter wrote:
| I wonder how much getting that number cost them, I recall
| vaguely that memorable premium short numbers were... Expensive
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| A lot of people don't realise that Shazam is built into iOS. You
| don't actually need the app. Just ask Siri "What's playing?" and
| it will start to listen.
| jliptzin wrote:
| I haven't used Shazam in at least 10 years, I know what music I
| am listening to because I am streaming it.
| danbr wrote:
| Does it strike anyone else as being odd that Apple is noting this
| in their "Newsroom" press release? Don't get me wrong, great for
| Shazam and all ... but why is Apple - the company that bought
| them just 4 years ago - is making a todo about it?
| axg11 wrote:
| I think it's great. Too often, when a larger company acquires a
| smaller one, they try to erase all history and culture of the
| smaller company. Obviously, there is still a self-
| congratulatory tone to this press release, but I think it's
| nice that they're recognizing Shazam's past.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No it doesn't. Does it strike anyone else as odd that someone
| would question a company promoting/congratulating software
| achievements that they own?
| nailer wrote:
| Google doesn't celebrate the history of Writely or Android-
| pre-Google that much and Microsoft don't promote the history
| of Excel-pre-Microsoft that much either.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > Microsoft don't promote the history of Excel-pre-
| Microsoft that much either.
|
| That's probably because no such history exists, Excel was
| always a Microsoft product (even if they aren't the
| inventors of spreadsheets).
| jsmith45 wrote:
| They were probably thinking of PowerPoint, which did
| exist before Microsoft acquired it.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Sure but Apple does celebrate its products via Newsroom.
| Hell they even did it for iTunes in 2004
| pohl wrote:
| Their celebrations would be more like "10 years ago today
| we killed the only product of ours that you ever loved."
| trollied wrote:
| I don't understand why you're so confused. Shazam is now part
| of Apple, they are not going to do a press release as "Shazam".
| The "Shazam" entity does not exist.
| beefman wrote:
| An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm (2003)
|
| https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf
| DevX101 wrote:
| Short, recommended read on how Shazam works
| swid wrote:
| Here's the list on Spotify:
|
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2Z69DiD4sGs5aHt4OXE3fU?si=...
| keepquestioning wrote:
| Does Shazam now use Deep Learning?
| dperalta wrote:
| How Shazam works (Probably!): https://youtu.be/RRsq9apr5QY
| munchler wrote:
| TIL that Apple owns Shazam.
| wincy wrote:
| Heck yeah! If you've got an iPhone you literally just have to
| say "Hey Siri, what's this song" and it'll start listening and
| give you the Apple Music link. The only indication it's Shazam
| is a little understated badge at the bottom.
| [deleted]
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It's also available as a shortcut in the Control Centre - you
| don't even have to install the app.
| raghavbali wrote:
| +1 and also the fact that Google Pixel's "Now Playing" feature
| is such an amazing application of the same idea. Though I
| wonder how different are their implementations
| jaypeg25 wrote:
| Google's now playing feature is somehow always offline (to
| relieve privacy concerns) and is somehow still incredible at
| recognizing even obscure songs. Really impressive.
|
| I also love that it just shows up on my lock screen.
| nomilk wrote:
| > August 2002: Shazam launches as a text message service based in
| the UK. At the time, users could identify songs by dialing "2580"
| on their phone and holding it up as a song played. They were then
| sent an SMS message telling them the song title and the name of
| the artist.
|
| Incredible! Curious to know what exactly happened backend after
| it listened to the audio, and what hardware it ran on.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Just as amazing to me is that the algorithms could identify a
| song through the extremely limited bandwidth and spectrum of an
| early-2000s CDMA stream and a cheap Kyocera microphone.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| The UK was one of the first countries to introduce GSM-EFR
| which used the ACELP codec at 12.2 kbit/s for phone calls.
| The quality was actually pretty good.
|
| I don't really understand why phone call fidelity hasn't
| improved since then. Sometimes it seems like it's even worse!
| tialaramex wrote:
| Imagine that audio fidelity is crucial. You are designing a
| phone. Does it resemble a hand-sized rectangular piece of
| glass?
|
| No? I guess the hypothesis that audio fidelity is crucial
| was wrong.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| Low bandwidth is perfectly suitable for low frequency data
| (ie melody). You lose some of the high frequency details (ie
| timbre), but it's still very easy to recognize songs.
|
| It's the same as recognizing objects in a 256x256px image.
|
| Try resampling a song from 44kHz to 4kHz and you'll still
| have no trouble recognizing it.
| manderley wrote:
| GSM, not CDMA.
| post-it wrote:
| CDMA on Verizon and Sprint in the USA and Bell and Telus in
| Canada, at the time.
| gridder wrote:
| Yeah but we're talking about UK here.... So GSM is
| correct.
| sbuk wrote:
| "> August 2002: Shazam launches as a text message service
| based in the UK."
|
| AFAIR, we never had CDMA _in the UK_ , so what Verizon et
| al. were using is irrelevant.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Reminds me of a fun IRC moment 20 years ago or so. A buddy had a
| song stuck in his head, but he couldn't recall the name of it.
|
| I asked how it went, and he typed something like "du du duu duu
| du du duu du, du du duu duu du du duu du" and within 10 seconds I
| replied "oh, Tom's diner by Suzanne Vega?" After a few moments he
| replied "yes! how the hell?!"
|
| Anyway, Shazam is great when out and about and I hear something I
| like. Clubs and other _loud_ venues provide a challenge, but
| covering the mic usually does the trick.
|
| I'd love to read some more details about how such fingerprinting
| works. I'm sure there are lots of interesting details on how it
| deals with recording noise and such.
| endorphine wrote:
| Lol, I swear that while reading the 2nd "duu" the same song
| came to mind. Not sure what happened here..
| bluedino wrote:
| Thought for sure that was on bash.org as I'd seen it before
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I'm sure there are lots of interesting details on how it
| deals with recording noise and such.
|
| There's more to Shazam than that but Fourier transforms gets
| rid of the noise. I ported a FFT to Java back in the days and
| it was, IIRC, not even 100 lines of code. Amazing algorithm. I
| used it to record engine noise under acceleration and then
| derive power/torque curve of my car (it took into account the
| number of cylinders): drive the car several times, both ways,
| on a street, record the noise. Apply the FFT. Input the rims
| size / gear ratio etc. And I'd end up with about the exact same
| plot as the official one from the car manufacturer.
|
| Noise simply disappears with a FFT.
|
| A more concerning issue is harmonics.
| ducktective wrote:
| Is there a CLI program similar to that? (for identifying songs
| based on a sample).
|
| CLI app not Python notebook, btw.
| rmnclmnt wrote:
| You can << easily >> reproduce the process and make a CLI out
| of it, but the hard part is to collect the enormous database...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| acoustid is an open-source database with an API; here's a list
| of already existing applications. beets is definitely CLI, not
| sure about some of the others:
|
| https://acoustid.org/applications
| elboru wrote:
| Sometimes, I like to stop and think about all the amazing things
| that we can do with our phones and that we take for granted.
|
| What I do is to imagine myself finding a smartphone in elementary
| school (90s kid). These are a few things that would blow my mind:
|
| - Having a digital global map, with multitouch, that can show me
| where I am in that map. I can search anything and find reviews
| from virtually anywhere in the world. I can zoom and see my
| actual house. I can use street view.
|
| - I have access to any song I want.
|
| - The phone can listen to a song and it can tell me the name of
| it (then I can listen to it again)
|
| - I can play video games with much better graphics than my N64
|
| - I can watch movies and TV in there.
|
| - I can video call
|
| - I have a digital assistant
|
| - I can find any answer online
|
| - I can buy anything online
|
| - In the future all this technology is not just for the rich,
| virtually anyone can buy a smartphone.
| Vinnl wrote:
| My goto example is that I'm now able to see the text of the
| text message I'm replying to _while typing the reply_.
| raamdev wrote:
| In the mid-ninties, around the time I had just become a teenager,
| I remember walking down the back corridor of a mall where my
| parents were leasing a space for their business and hearing a
| song playing overhead on the mall speakers that really caught my
| attention. I had no idea what the song was called or who made it,
| but I really liked it. I remember wishing I had some way to
| quickly find out, before the song ended, the name of the song and
| the artist. I remember thinking, "wouldn't it be great if this
| cell phone in my pocket could somehow tell me the name of this
| song?"
|
| A decade later I discovered Shazam, and even today, more than a
| decade after that, Shazam still has a place on my home screen,
| quickly within reach, helping me discover hundreds of great
| artists and songs overheard from as many different places. The
| magic of the experience, and the appreciation for the technology,
| stem from the memory of that moment in the mid-nineties when I
| stood under a speaker listening to a song that I might never hear
| again.
| yannis7 wrote:
| Shazam belongs to that class of iPhone apps that when they were
| released I was like "wow, the future is here" -- this alongside
| the first accelerometer and AR ones
| jfoster wrote:
| I'm surprised that Apple have kept Shazam working well on Android
| for this long. They acquired it 4 years ago already.
| lhoff wrote:
| If i remember correctly the main way shazam makes money is by
| seeling statistics to the record companies and concert planer.
| If they would break it, they would loose these informations in
| certain areas of the world where iphones are not that common.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I have to believe that much of the reason for Apple buying
| Shazam was to know what songs piqued people's interest. That
| type of data has to be valuable.
| jfoster wrote:
| Good point. Otherwise $400m is quite a high price to pay just
| for an entry point into Apple Music.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| It might have something to do with the big "Play Full Song"
| button that opens Apple Music. Since they already have access
| to their music catalog for fingerprinting and the app is
| mature, maybe it pays for itself in subscriptions?
| jfoster wrote:
| That did cross my mind and probably explains it. I do wonder
| how much Apple Music revenue really comes from Android users
| via Shazam, but perhaps it's significant enough that they
| don't want to ruin it.
| cannam wrote:
| Yeah, I imagine as long as Apple Music runs on Android, so
| will Shazam. It's a gateway.
| ricksunny wrote:
| I'm confused - I love Shazam as much as the next person - but why
| is an app's anniversary pushed to the top of Apple's newsroom
| feed when there is no native write-up of comparable reach &
| understandability for their critical, already-exploited security
| update spanning the entire product line?
|
| I expose the extent of my confusion here:
| https://twitter.com/walkaboutrick/status/1560713609948250113...
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| 20 years later and it still seems like magic. It's incredibly
| impressive how it can identify a song in second even in noisy
| environments.
| nailer wrote:
| The Shazam creators commissioned a movie to be made about their
| company - they considered it to be like "The Social Network"
| except them as the heroes.
|
| Source: I watched the Shazam founder awkwardly pitch Danny Boyle
| at a director meet-and-greet while Danny tried his best to avoid
| them.
| willhackett wrote:
| Shazam is truly magical. For those iPhone users that don't know,
| you can add it to Control Centre for quick access.
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