Shazam (1999)

Initially, Shazam worked like this: you called a short number, held your phone up to the speaker, and after half a minute, you received a text message with the song title. The service appeared in 1999, long before smartphones, and even then it could do the main thing — recognize music from a snippet of sound. It works not by comparing melodies, but by using a fingerprint: a pattern of frequency peaks over time is extracted from the recording, resilient to noise and chatter around, and a match is searched for in the database. Hence the trick that still impresses: recognizing a track in a noisy bar in a couple of seconds. Now the service is owned by Apple, the app is free and ad-free, there is a history of recognitions, links to streaming services, song lyrics, and a background mode that works without your involvement. It does not recognize live music, covers, and humming — for that, there is SoundHound and the 'humming a melody' feature from Google.

Program card in the MegaInet.art catalog — reference information. Files are not distributed. Actual data: Wikidata (CC0).