song “IDenity”
I just saw a commercial for Verizon’s Song IDentity. Basically you hear a sweet jam and hold your phone up to it. Verizon tells you what the song is and gives you the option of downloading the ringtone.
Granted it’s massively overpriced, but I’m pretty interested in the technology behind it. It must be fairly hard to identify a song from just a few seconds of music in a probably noisy environment. Then again, other people are trying to ID songs based solo on you tapping the rhythm into your keyboard.
I should get my friend Mim to weigh in on this. He researches this sort of stuff.
May 16th, 2007 at 5:03 am
The service is powered by Shazam, a company in Londond that does this sort of thing. It’s been available there for a few years now, but hasn’t made it big over here yet.
There are a few companies doing what is called “music fingerprinting” or “audio fingerprinting”, like Microsoft, Google, Phillips, MusicIP, GraceNote, etc. Some of those might be the same technology. The idea is to memorize little tiny bits of songs or other sounds that they have seen before and then tell you when those tiny bits occur with the same timing, implying that that exact song/sound is playing again. They are generally made to be robust even if it’s over a cell phone or there’s lots of background noise.
Wang gave a presentation at ISMIR 2003 that described the basic idea of the system, looking for matches in a “constellation” of points in the spectrogram. In a demo on that talk, he was able to identify 8 different songs all playing at the same time. There’s also a paper in the Communications of the ACM that I haven’t read. It’s quite clever for the task at hand, I’d like to know if it would generalize to identifying “similar” music.