How does Shazam work?

155

ddatadrivenangel 3 days ago 34 commentsRead Article on perthirtysix.com

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Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

swyx•about 3 hours ago

related comments from Shazamers

- OG shazam paper https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf (he has a talk on youtube btw look it up if really care)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18069968 shazam employee blogpost

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38538996 shazam cofounder endorsed explainer

- go algo repro https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41127726

as with all ML things... the code is much less % of the value than the data...

thakoppno•about 3 hours ago

Perhaps obviously this is the same technique that enables ACR on TVs.

It occurs to me that Shazam has such a better reputation online because the intent and consent of the user is honored.

It makes me wonder if there couldn’t be an implementation on TVs that is similar and actually is a net positive for consumers. Basically would customers actually like TV ACR if the data wasn’t just going to sell more ads?

krustyburger•about 3 hours ago

So the value-add would be the consumer would get to find out the name of the show or movie that’s playing, the same info that also pops up if they hit the pause button?

thakoppno•about 2 hours ago

I was thinking more like interactive content. Do you remember when VH1 had a pop-up music video show?

Shows could synchronize additional content that’d be visible when Shazam mode enabled.

flymasterv•about 2 hours ago

We did this on Fire Phone for live sports and audio based X-Ray cast info. It was, like everything about that phone, a really fun tech demo.

w-ll•about 2 hours ago

Pop. Pop. Pop Up Video.

wrxd•28 minutes ago

Tangential. This is a cool website, so cool that I tried to subscribe to it in my RSS reader… and it didn’t work.

If any of the authors read this message, please consider adding a RSS feed and you’ve got a subscriber!

sandos•about 1 hour ago

Well, my latest guess is: not at all.

It has been working "fine" for me generally for popular music. But then I was at a ice skating competition where there were some really nice synth:y music going on in the pauses, and I used Shazam on several of the songs, and I tried several times on each. It did not find a single one correctly.

Either this was unreleased music or very small niched music or something, or Shazam totally failed?

nunez•19 minutes ago

Yeah Shazam is mostly useless for songs that aren’t in the streaming apps, I’ve found. but not entirely useless! It sometimes matches me with stuff that’s only on YouTube.

larodi•about 2 hours ago

There's an algo called dynamic time warping (DTW) and is very often overlooked. My wild guess would be is at play @Shazam.

old_bayes•about 2 hours ago

Ayyy I used DTW to track bots on a certain social media site. They tend to act in herds so DTW helps smooth out delayed, repeat actions.

rmnclmnt•about 1 hour ago

Might be the best visual explainer of Shazam original audio fingerprinting algorithm from the 2003 paper (I guess they´ve switched to ML models at some point?)

Animats•about 3 hours ago

Recognizing a recording isn't hard to do, because, for the same recording, the chords follow each other with precisely repeatable timing. That's been around for well over a decade. Recognizing a different recording, say, a, cover version, of the same song, is much more work.

Audible Magic claims to be able to recognize multiple performances of the same songs, and even parodies.[1] Using, of course, "AI technology" and much more compute.

[1] https://www.audiblemagic.com/2024/02/07/identifying-cover-so...

Gigachad•about 1 hour ago

"Isn't hard to do" is doing some heavy lifting. Obviously on a society level it's simple tech we managed ages ago. But I would bet if you tasked individual devs at building it without looking up the answer, very few could do it.

bitexploder•about 3 hours ago

20 years at least. I remember seeing how Gracenote worked back in the day when I was consulting for them.

andai•about 3 hours ago

Why is this harder than "delete timing information" ?

gnabgib•about 3 hours ago

Again? Oh I see.. SCP (this domain is sus)

From CameronMacLeod (2022) - and much more complete analysis (587 points, 2023, 155 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38531428

Or Slate (2009) (50 points, 16 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=893353

BLKNSLVR•about 3 hours ago

Forgive my ignorance, but what does SCP mean in this context? (my normal go-to of 'secure copy' doesn't fit).

Thanks for the other links, the question in this title is one I've day-dreamily thought about on occasion, but never dug into. Will have a read of all three.

Animats•about 3 hours ago

Vaguely relevant pop-culture reference.[1]

[1] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/glossary-of-terms

BLKNSLVR•about 3 hours ago

I seem to have wandered into a parallel universe.

I think it'll take me longer to understand WTF SCP is than it will to understand how Shazam works.

eichin•about 2 hours ago

probably the HN-specific "Second Chance Pool" for resurfacing links

cyral•about 3 hours ago

The interactive parts of this post are very cool though

dataviz1000•about 3 hours ago

Add to my list of projects. Dinosaur game but with audible clucks to jump.

G_o_D•about 3 hours ago

Out of curiosity is it possible to prevent shazam like app from detecting maybe by adding noise or any technique ?

knodi123•about 2 hours ago

Not unless your noise is louder at certain dominant frequencies than the source. The article gives examples, but the algorithm basically throws away everything except frequency peaks, in order to make the lookups faster.

Gigachad•about 1 hour ago

Producers/DJs manage this one by just not releasing their music or edits for ages if ever.

cellular•about 4 hours ago

I did this for a science project in 1986 on an Apple ][c computer !

krishna_dam•about 3 hours ago

Surprised to see how that got it worked with out all the "AI" bluff

flyuk•about 2 hours ago

Nice article - enjoyed reading!

SilverElfin•about 1 hour ago

I feel like it does not work well. Shazam struggles to recognize music in real life environments that have some background noise, even with a lot of time. It’s much worse than the built in music recognition Google’s phones have, for example.

blackjackfoe•about 3 hours ago

No "AI" required!

wood_spirit•about 3 hours ago

Reminds me of Roy Van Rijn’s prototype that got a cease and desist letter! Lots of community disappointment at the time!

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=royvanrijn

dackdel•about 3 hours ago

voodoo

yawpitch•about 2 hours ago

This has been explained so many times… a wizard imbued the kid with the powers of Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury.