Waxy.org
Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a writer and tech entrepreneur in Portland, OR. I work with Expert Labs, helped build Kickstarter, founded Upcoming, made an album, and other stuff too.

Contact Me: Email, AOL IM, or follow me on Twitter.

"Name That Tune" Search Engines

Posted Aug 26, 2002

Just launched in the UK, Shazam is a search engine that plays "Name That Tune." Cell phone owners dial a number and play a 15-second song clip (presumably from the radio or a club) into the phone's receiver. After comparing a hash of the clip against their database of 1.2 million songs, Shazam returns their best guess via SMS text message.

The audio recognition algorithm was developed by chief scientist and co-founder Avery Wang. His 1994 thesis on sound separation is available for download, which provides some clues into how they may be extracting music from voice and other background noise. (More information about the service from the BBC, The Guardian, and Red Herring.)

How long before someone (Google, maybe) creates a web-based version that allows you to upload sound clips for identification? And contribute properly-tagged MP3s from your own collection? A truly comprehensive database of music would help people like Alan Taylor and all these other poor souls.

6 Comments (Add Yours)

Aug 26, 2002
2:36 PM  
jonah wrote:

How long until you can call in and hum the song or mangle the words and it will tell you what you heard? That would be impressive.


Aug 26, 2002
4:33 PM  
Konstantinos wrote:

I say it's in the distant future. We need proper metadata-ization of the mp3 files, but almost no-one gives a damn about properly tagging his MP3s. "A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia", as Cory so well put it.

(By the way, if something like that ever happens, it would also help yours truly.)


Aug 26, 2002
11:12 PM  
Alan Taylor (kokogiak) wrote:

How cool - it looks like it doesn't need any kind of metadata to work, just hold the phone up to a speaker. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to do something like that online at all. Great find!


Aug 27, 2002
2:25 AM  
Konstantinos wrote:

For the record, I'm saying that the need for metadata is the answer to the second question. ("And contribute properly-tagged MP3s from your own collection?").


Aug 27, 2002
8:23 AM  
Andy wrote:

Heck, you wouldn't even need to use ID3 tags in a situation like this. If an MP3 matches the sound clip, just return the file for download. (Of course, this whole enterprise would require a ridiculous amount of storage and bandwidth.)


Jun 15, 2004
10:12 PM  
Joshua wrote:

You guys may want to check out http://www.tuneteller.com


 

Leave a comment





Waxy Links
Ads via The Deck
February 8, 2012
Double Fine's Kickstarter project to make a new point-and-click adventure — best project video ever; I backed it so hard
Interactive ASCII fluid dynamics animation — based on this JS simulation (via)
What Popular iPhone/Android Apps Know/Transmit About You — ignore the awful visualization and skip to the table; Angry Birds sends your contacts to third parties!?
Path apologizes, deletes user address books — they never should've done it in the first place, but this is the right way to handle it
BBC tracks down an Internet troll — as the Daily Dot points out, he's more of a racist asshole than a troll (via)
February 7, 2012
PressPausePlay — stylish documentary on the digital media revolution of the last decade
February 6, 2012
Restored Disneyland footage from 1957 — only open for two years in this video
Robot readable world — found footage from machine-vision tests
February 3, 2012
Avería, the average font — preview them all (via)
February 2, 2012
How and why Mark Jaquith became an atheist — gripping personal story of the life-affirming shift from faith to evidence (via)
Where's the Pixel? — find and click on the black pixel; you may need to clean your screen first (via)
ARTINFO on the chilling effect of the Prince v. Cariou copyright ruling — the journalist mentions me and Kind of Bloop
Darkness — a brilliant 24-hour comic by French cartoonist Boulet (via)
January 31, 2012
Nano quadrotors flying in formation — don't miss the figure 8 pattern at the end (via)
Bootstrap 2 released — here's the announcement
Jeff Atwood on the risks of unmoderated communities — left to their own devices, popular online communities get taken over by cheap, easy gags (via)
How and why J.D. Roth sold Get Rich Slowly — interesting tale of a founder selling his site, but unable to share the details for years
Yahoo lays off in-house Flickr support team — from what I hear, it was done with 10 minutes' notice to Flickr management
Mapstalgia — videogame maps drawn from memory
January 30, 2012
Shit Programmers Say — strikingly similar to Shit Rocks Say
Impressions of Corporate Logos by a 5-Year-Old — "a cheetah, a cheetah, a cheetah"
Bellbot — web app that beeps when you get new signups or sales
ScratchML — markup language for recording and replaying turntablism
Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? — nice piece of Quora fiction (via)
David Carr on Kickstarter's film funding at Sundance — 10% of the festival was funded on Kickstarter, with two optioned by HBO
Why ten-year attendee Mike Pusateri's skipping SXSW this year — I made the same decision to skip this year; I may regret it, but it just wasn't fun last year
MegaUpload's user data set to be destroyed by Friday — collateral damage in the copyright war
Blogging declines across the Inc. 500 — too bad; Twitter and Facebook aren't a replacement for longer-form communication
January 29, 2012
ChatChat — Terry Cavanagh's multiplayer game about being a cat (via)
January 27, 2012
Identifying Ice Cube's "Good Day" — process of elimination

Andy Baio lives here. Some rights reserved, for your pleasure.