How The Heck Does Shazam Work? (An Interactive Exploration) (perthirtysix.com)

submitted 1 month ago by alyaza@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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You're at a coffee shop. A song comes on. It's right on the tip of your tongue. You pull out your phone, tap a button, and it tells you what it is in a few seconds.

How does a phone listen to a few seconds of music through a noisy room and instantly match it against millions of songs?

Your first instinct might be that the phone is listening to the melody or recognizing the lyrics. It's neither of those. What it's actually doing is far more clever.

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[-] timwa@lemmy.snowgoons.ro 2 points 1 month ago

That's brilliant, thank you!

They should cover JPEG compression at some point; when I first learned how that worked (at uni nearly 40 years ago... God) I was blown away by how beautiful that algorithm is.

[-] Gumus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago

Better yet, JPEG and MP3 are basically the same compression algoritm.

this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026

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