HOW SHAZAM WORKS IS INGENIOUS!

How does Shazam and other music recognition software work? Let's take a look.

With tens of thousands of mobile apps at our disposal, there are some that we just can't live without! If you're into music and want the ability to find out a song title, artist or album, then there is no better app for you other than Shazam.

By simply opening up the Shazam app and clicking on the blue logo, the app will then listen to the song you're trying to identify, even in a noisy environment, and Shazam will tell you exactly what the song is called, who sang or produced it, and which album it's from. Furthermore, Shazam is able to open the song in either Apple Music, Spotify or other music streaming services you might have on your phone, so you can instantly listen to it and/or add it to a playlist you have created.

But how does the ingenious Shazam app actually work?

So first of all, if Shazam just listened to a portion of a song and tried to match it up with the millions of songs in their database it would take years for the app to give us our results. The problem is that in that method there is simply far too much data to process in a few seconds.

So what Shazam does is filter the recorded seconds of audio down drastically into something that looks like a star map called a filtered spectrogram, it then matches that data with its library to give you a result in a few seconds. This is all made possible by filtering out 99.9% of the song and simply keeps its most recognisable aspects as a musical fingerprint.

Take a look at the video below by YouTube channel, Real Engineering, on How Shazam Works, it'll blow your mind.