Článek
You hear a familiar song in the club or the restaurant. You listened to this song a thousand times long ago, and the sentimentality of the song really touches your heart. You desperately want to hear it tomorrow, but you can’t remember its name! Fortunately, in our amazing futuristic world, you have a phone with music recognition software installed, and you are saved. You can relax, because software told you the name of the song, and you know that you can hear it again and again until it becomes a part of you…or you get sick of it.
Mobile technologies, along with the huge progress in audio signal processing, have given us algorithm developers the ability to create music recognizers. One of the most popular music recognition apps is Shazam. If you capture 20 seconds of a song, no matter if it’s intro, verse, or chorus, it will create a fingerprint for the recorded sample, consult the database, and use its music recognition algorithm to tell you exactly which song you are listening to.
How Does Shazam Work? Now You Know
This kind of song recognition software can be used for finding the similarities between songs. Now that you understand how Shazam works, you can see how this can have applications beyond simply Shazaming that nostalgic song playing on the taxi radio. For example, it can help to identify plagiarism in music, or to find out who was the initial inspiration to some pioneers of blues, jazz, rock, pop or any other genre. Maybe a good experiment would be to fill up the song sample database with the classical music of Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Wagner, Chopin and Mozart and try finding the similarities between songs. You would think that even Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Robert Johnson were plagiarists!
But still we cannot convict them, because music is just a wave that we hear, memorize and repeat in our heads, where it evolves and changes until we record it in the studio and pass it on to the next great musical genius.
