Search for music by sound: recognition services
Search for music by sound: recognition services

Video: Search for music by sound: recognition services

Video: Search for music by sound: recognition services
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Searching for music by sound is an important task for many people. There are situations in life when, for example, a recording made on a tape recorder many years ago cannot be recognized, that is, it is impossible to independently determine the group or singer who performs this work, the name of the composition, the year of recording, and so on.

This article will look at several programs that help solve this problem.

Most popular service

Many Android smartphone users may see a blue icon on their desktop with a white capital S.

Shazam in action
Shazam in action

This icon represents the Shazam application, which is a program for finding music by sound. It comes pre-installed on many smartphone models and is ranked among the top 10 best and most popular apps in the world by some publications.

Where to start?

The interface of this program is extremely simple. Through the microphone, the search for music by sound is carried out immediately after pressing the button, which has a round shape and is located in the middle of the screen. After this action is performed, the key with the letter S turns into a rotating multiplied element.

Users usually don't have to wait long. After a few seconds, usually 2-5, the owner of the gadget sees the search result on the display. In this application, in addition to the results traditional for such services in the form of an artist name, track name, recording year, album name, and so on, there is usually also a link to a clip located on the YouTube service. Sometimes you can also read the artist's biography here, and the program also offers to buy this musical material through a website. To get the result in the very near future, of course, you need an Internet connection via Wi-Fi or through a mobile provider.

And if there is no connection?

Just a couple of years ago, this circumstance was considered an insurmountable obstacle to finding music by sound. However, the developers of this application have already figured out how to make it easier for their customers to receive the song recognition service.

So, at the moment, in this music search program by sound for Android and other operating systems, it is possible to find information about the track of interest even if the mobile Internet is inactive at the time the song is playingcondition. How does this happen? To understand this, you must first find out how the material identification process itself is carried out.

Secret

So, the search for music by sound through this application is as follows.

When a user of a mobile device hears a track that interests him and wants to know who performs it, he clicks on the icon of this program, and after that he has no other choice but to do the same with the round button in the middle screen, since no other controls are provided at this stage. Next comes the recognition process.

The program captures a musical composition in the form of an audio signal, but not as an audio recording, as a voice recorder or other device does, but converts it into a spectrogram, that is, into a special graph that encodes the volume of sounds using colors, duration - in as the length of each individual mark, and the frequency of oscillation is depicted as a height.

Composition spectrogram
Composition spectrogram

But this process is invisible to the user of the program, all he can see is the animation of the round frame of the Shazam key and the almost immediate output of the result.

In fact, the spectrogram is compared with the same graphs that are in the virtual archive of the program for finding music by sound Shazam. As soon as the application finds a suitable option, that is, a drawing similar to the one just made, then it immediately gives the result in the form of information abouttrack.

If song not found?

In this case, the application notifies the user that such a song or instrumental piece is not in its database.

If the Internet is disabled, then the recoding of the audio signal into a spectrogram occurs immediately, and its comparison with the virtual archive is carried out only after connecting to the Network.

If you register in the program, some additional functions become available, the most useful of which is a list of previously viewed and recognized songs. This may be necessary, for example, if a person heard the music he liked at work, when he did not have enough free time to download his favorite song.

This he can do when he opens the Shazam program at his leisure. The base of this wonderful application contains several million songs of various genres. Users will be pleasantly surprised that this offer to search for music by sound can also recognize Russian-language works.

Shazam, open up

This audio search app was developed by an English company founded by two students. It is estimated that at the moment the number of its users is more than 200 million people around the world. The concept of "shazamite" has even appeared in the Russian language, even though not yet recorded in official dictionaries.

This, no doubt, indicates the growing popularity of this program.

Emblems of two companies
Emblems of two companies

And one more fact aboutThe great prospects for the development of this proposal is that at the end of last year, Shazam and all rights to it were bought by the American company Apple, widely known for its mobile and other devices.

Rivals of the British

However, American developers of computer applications do not lag behind their counterparts from the UK. They also invented their own application that searches for music by sound on a computer or mobile devices.

Music recognition software
Music recognition software

This program was created by Soundhound and bears the same name. It can be downloaded absolutely free of charge, but the free version is replete with ads. For those who do not want to spend time installing any programs on their devices, there is an opportunity to recognize the composition directly on the company's website.

Sing the light, don't be ashamed

A distinctive feature of this service is that there is an opportunity not only to recognize the songs that are in the audio recording and sound during identification, but also to sing a fragment from the memorized melody, which, most likely, will be identified. The probability that the composition will be recognized and detailed information will appear before the user on the screen of a desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone is approximately 95%. But the result is displayed not as the name of a single song, but as a list of several options, the first of which is the most likely result. And then in descending order.

One has only to say thatthat in order to use this function, a person must have a sufficiently well-developed ear for music and accurate intonation to be able to reproduce a passage well enough. Otherwise, the program will still offer a certain list of several songs, but, most likely, they will not all be what you are looking for.

Google

There are several more ways to search for music by sound on your computer. One of them is a service from an American popular search engine. Searching for music by sound in Google is not much inferior in accuracy to the applications described above.

google music
google music

However, it is not a program per se. Google only offers to add a link icon to the corresponding online service on the desktop.

Our answer to the West

All music search apps for Android operate on a similar principle, namely, using the spectrogram method.

Russia has also recently had its own service for music lovers.

It's called the Audiotag. info and is the development of programmers working in the staff of the electronic magazine websound.ru.

Russian music search service
Russian music search service

A feature of this music recognition service is that there is no way to determine the sounding composition through a microphone online. However, the site helps to find information about the track of interest if you upload the record to the server.

Music lovers will be pleasantly surprised that this site is designed specifically for music lovers from ourcountries. In addition to Western compositions, he also recognizes well the works performed by domestic artists, including pop music from the Soviet period.

Conclusion

In this article, services for searching music by sound were considered. Some of them can only be used on mobile devices, and some are designed for smartphones. All these developments do their job perfectly.

music search
music search

The choice of each specific user depends only on the conditions for using the services: the device with which he is dealing and what type of service the remote prefers - the application or the online version.

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