Tuesday, October 06, 2009

How things work - Shaazam

I always wondered how Shaazam worked (the app that automagically identifies songs). And today, I came across this document by one of the Shaazam creators that explains how it works:
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

The basic idea is that it uses a songs spectrogram (a graph of time on the x axis, frequency on the y axis) to generate a signature for each song. Samples uploaded from phones are converted to a spectrogram and compared against a database of pre-generated spectrograms to figure out information about the songs.

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