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How The Heck Does Shazam Work? (An Interactive Exploration) (perthirtysix.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [M] to c/technology@beehaw.org
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You're at a coffee shop. A song comes on. It's right on the tip of your tongue. You pull out your phone, tap a button, and it tells you what it is in a few seconds.

How does a phone listen to a few seconds of music through a noisy room and instantly match it against millions of songs?

Your first instinct might be that the phone is listening to the melody or recognizing the lyrics. It's neither of those. What it's actually doing is far more clever.

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[–] 8 points 5 months ago

A technical post in the Technology community, nice!

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    [–] 7 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I've also noticed this is why Shazaam is shit even at a concert by the original band.

    The link alludes to this when it talks about shazaam not handling us singing a song very well, but it strikes me as most stark when it's even the original artist.

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    • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    I really liked this article! Thanks for the link. Gonna check out their QR Code article next

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    [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Cool :)

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    [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    That's brilliant, thank you!

    They should cover JPEG compression at some point; when I first learned how that worked (at uni nearly 40 years ago... God) I was blown away by how beautiful that algorithm is.

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