I was using Shazam the other day and to my amusement, it was able to figure out every song with a 99% success rate. It is an awesome piece of software that, at first, feels like magic? Right? No. It’s something called engineering.
Before I begin, I understand that not all of my readers know what Shazam is. Well, Shazam is a mobile application that figures out the name of the song just by hearing it. It is very artificially intelligent. You can download the iOS version here and the Android version here.
Why would you use Shazam? Ok what if you are in this club and a nice song is being played in the background and you want to know what song is it. Even with considerable noise, Shazam can figure it out for you. It’s pretty incredible at what it does.
How does Shazam work?
Shazam, as officially described, is an industrial strength audio search algorithm. In other words, it’s effectively an audio search engine.
The Shazam algorithm has fingerprints of the 11 million songs (and growing) in its database. When an unknown song is being played, a short sample is recorded and a fingerprint is generated.
Through fingerprints, or combinatorially hashed time-frequency constellation analysis of the audio, the unknown sample is matched with the sample in the database by analysis. In a matter of seconds, the Shazam software is able to tell you the name of the song you just heard.
To be more geeky, it uses a spectrogram analysis. The point at where hash locations intersect is the indicator of a match of the sample fingerprint with the stored fingerprint in the database.
Awesome isn’t it?
About Ali Gajani
Hi. I am Ali Gajani. I started Mr. Geek in early 2012 as a result of my growing enthusiasm and passion for technology. I love sharing my knowledge and helping out the community by creating useful, engaging and compelling content. If you want to write for Mr. Geek, just PM me on my Facebook profile.
