There are some things that always impress. A guy who holds the door open (I am ridiculously old fashioned), a dog that knows how to shake paws and the music identifying app – Shazam! Farhad Manjoo, who writes the tech column over at Slate describes the app as the closest thing to magic. I wouldn’t go that far, but if you’ve wondered how the app works, he has the deets here.
Manjoo writes that Shazam has a library of more than 8 million songs, and it has devised a technique to break down each track into a simple numeric signature—a code that is unique to each track. “The main thing here is creating a ‘fingerprint’ of each performance,” says Andrew Fisher, Shazam’s CEO, in an interview to Slate. When you hold your phone up to a song you’d like to ID, Shazam turns your clip into a signature using the same method. Then it’s just a matter of pattern-matching—Shazam searches its library for the code it created from your clip; when it finds that bit, it knows it’s found your song.
Hah! Now you know! So go out, stick your paw out in a noisy bar to use Shazam to id that song and floor that lady with inside knowledge of how Shazam works!
