How Music Identification Apps Work
Since it started in 1999, Shazam has been used to identify songs over fifty billion times, and that’s not even counting the IDs from Soundhound, MusicID, and other sound-recognition apps. From a user’s perspective, it’s simple: Start the app, press a button, and let your phone listen to the song. After a few seconds, even with background noise and distortion, the app will tell you what the song is. It works so quickly and so well that it almost seems like magic – but, as with most magical things these days, it’s mostly run by algorithms....