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Re:Shazam turns 20 by saghm on Friday August 19, 2022 @11:43AM (#32522434)
My instinct is that it probably isn't as simple as you describe because not only are there multiple notes at a time in a given track (i.e. chords), but there are also several tracks playing at once! It's possible that they're literally generating data like {guitar 1: C chord, guitar 2: single note E, bass: single note E} for every point in time, but even then each instrument isn't playing the exact same rhythm most of the time, so the notes won't exactly line up. I guess I don't think it's completely computationally infeasible to do it this way, but it seems more likely that they're just trying to separate the music from the background noise and then try to find the closest match to the music audio as a whole rather than trying to separate it into component.
Re:Shazam turns 20 by goldcd on Friday August 19, 2022 @07:42PM (#32527451)
Sorry - I wasn't clear. I don't mean they're listening for notes. They're just analyzing the wave-form/fingerprint/whatever-you-want-to-call-it that's being generated at a moment, and then one form the next moment, then the next.

One of these might match random points in many songs, but a far smaller subset of these will have the same three in the same sequence.

Re:Shazam turns 20 by saghm on Saturday August 20, 2022 @12:39AM (#32529129)
Fair enough! I imagine that having many instruments at once would improve the ability to diff the waveform/etc. rather than hindering it then.