How Does Shazam Find the Song You’re Looking for?

What we hear in a cafe we ​​sit in, at events we attend, or simply in cool video edits. songs When we like it, turn on our phone and to Shazam We enter and Shazam can give us that song within seconds.

The ability to do this, especially in environments with intense background sounds such as cafes and events, means stopping; “How does one find the song in seconds?It makes you think. Of course, once you find the song, you can try the next song. Shazaming Since we do not look at the application until we need it, we do not pay much attention to what is going on in the background. But that part is more impressive.

First, let’s briefly talk about Shazam.

Our application, which reached more than 225 million users per month in 2022, has a very simple logic. When you open the app, all you have to do is tap the big logo once. Shazam then listens to the music using your microphone and visualizes what’s happening. It finds it in seconds like black magic.

Of course, let’s still move away from the traditions of the Middle Ages and choose not to call Shazam black magic. Here’s the logic behind it:

When you play music to Shazam, the sound waves of that music are converted into data that the computer can process. In this way, a unique wave is created for each song. finger print is created. This process is a simplification proceeds on its basis. Instead of including all areas where the sound gets louder, thinner or thicker, the peaks of these events in the sound waves are taken into account. This simplicity is what makes the process take seconds.

After understanding the basic logic, let’s move on to the practical example. Let’s say you liked the song playing while you were sitting in the cafe and you listened to it. You Shazamed. The moment you press the logo, Shazam records the sound into a spectrogram It creates. In this spectrogram, where all sounds coming into the microphone are recorded within a certain time interval (max. 20 seconds for Shazam), the peaks we just mentioned are created and the complexity you see above is simplified.

In the last stage, now turned into data These peaks are matched against each other and compared to other data pairs in Shazam’s massive library. If enough pairs match, Shazam announces that he found the song. song name and artist can give. Of course, this process we have described at length can be completed in seconds since it is developed by a computer.

When we look at it from this perspective, the Shazam algorithm is as simple and detailed as our breathing.