DID
YOU SAY "HAIL PHONE"?
No,
I meant « Ail phone »…
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TEST
OF IPHONE: SHAZAM
I got an Iphone
at the place I work, so I was able to test various things.
One
that could be interesting for some readers is Shazam, an App that
automatically detects the song you're listening to, giving you the
band name, song name and album cover...
It's a quite successful
App (Software) and peoples seem to enjoy it because the songs
happens to be detected in few seconds, and it seems to be working
quite often... So I decided to make a few tests to see how far it
could go.
FIRST
TEST:
Let's recognize some more or less underground records...
To
begin with, I choose mostly bands to be quite famous:
Napalm
Death: "It's a M.A.N.S World" (Enslavement To Obliteration
CD).
-> Worked
Bathory: "Hades"
(Bathory CD).
-> Worked
Exhumed:
"Excreting innards" (Chords of chaos split CD, later re-released
on a CD compilation).
-> Worked
Exit
13: "Societally provoked genocidal contemplation" (Ethos
Musick CD).
-> Worked
Since
these bands were all released on quite big labels, let's try something
more obscure, or released on labels that stopped their activities:
Nausea:
"Mind dead" (Crimes against humanity CD).
->
Didn't work
Dead Infection: "From the anatomical depths"
(Chapter Of Accidents CD).
-> Didn't
work
Sacramentum: "Fog's kiss" (Far away from the sun
CD).
-> Didn't work
Corpus Rottus:
"Vomit pool" (Rituals Of Silence Lp).
->
Didn't work
So this will work if someone from a label put
the songs on Itunes, legally or not... (You won't necessarily find
something that was released 15 years ago on a very small obscure
label that did only two records... But the software detected songs
from Viogression, so who knows...)
SECOND
TEST:
Let's change the sound of the music.
I
took a song from a later Napalm Death record that was detected easily
in "regular sounding" conditions.
Then I decided to
delete a good part of the mid-range and high-range frequencies with
an equalizer (This made the sound very deaf, with much more bass
frequencies than the original).
->
It worked.
Then I decided to make the game a little harder,
and pushed the bass frequencies much higher. The result in sound
was quite overdriven bass drums, and it began to be noisy.
-> Surprisingly it worked.
I
thought it wasn't cool, so I pushed the bass frequencies higher
again, it became more overdriven, sounded more like harsh noise
(Even if a human being could hear Napalm Death behind)...
->
And hopefully it didn't work :)
THIRD
TEST:
Let's change the speed of the song.
Then
I decided to decrease the speed of the song.
To make the process
a bit quicker (My computer is a bit slow sometimes)
I
took only 30 seconds from a song (Exactly 32.719 seconds).
The
first step was to make the song a little slower, the extract became
33.046 seconds long.
-> Detection
worked.
It also worked for the next step (33.373 seconds long),
but not for the following one (33.701seconds long).
Increasing
the speed of the song brought almost the same results, it was just
a little little better.
So the software will find what song it
is if you don't play him something too "damaged"...
Includes
Usb 3.0 port.
Compatible with Windows 7.
4TH
TEST:
Let's try to detect an unofficial live recording.
This
could be nice to try with an unofficial recording of a song that
was already in the database, to see if the software can detect this
song.
First I took two bootleg grind songs, but it worked
for none:
Napalm Death: "The Kill" (Live in Europe
1998 - Scum dead corporations bootleg)
Napalm Death: "Prison
without walls" (Live in Europe 1998 - Scum dead corporations
bootleg)
I thought it might be a bit too complicated for
the software to detect the same grindcore song but in other conditions,
since the style can be chaotic.
So I decided to make it
with easier listening music, and choose "Paranoid" from
Black Sabbath (Which might be one of their more "radiofriendly"
tracks).
Let's go on Youtube, and try the official recording
from this song, to make sure there's no problem with the website
for a reason or another: Shazam detected the song from the official
video, no surprise since it's the same recording than the album,
but it worked despite the quite bad quality sound (Youtube mp3 encoding)
so we know Youtube is ok for detecting.
Then I tried
with various live recordings:
Black Sabbath - Paranoid (Live
in Paris 1970).
-> Didn't work,
despite of the quite "clear" sound
Black Sabbath -
Paranoid (Live at Worcester 1983).
->
Didn't work
Black Sabbath - Paranoid (Live in Philadelphia 1985).
-> Didn't work
So Shazam doesn't
detect the song, but the audio recording. You could give him 30
different recordings of the same song but he wouldn't know it, on
the other hand you could give him 10 versions of the same recording
(With a "special effect" such as more echo, chorus, more
bass frequencies) and it could work.
This software could seem
like it's super-intelligent, while it is not: It only compares one
audio recording to others in the database. This said, I don't think
we could claim it's not intelligent since my tests (Deleting high
and mid frequencies) shows it's not as dumb as A = B and probably
compares the recordings under various angles (Amount of peaks, shape
of the audio spectrum...)
I imagine you could record the
noise of your water closets, then register it on Itunes, then play
the same recording to Shazam, and he would detect it's the same
recording... But unfortunately, if you play him another recording,
of the same water closets making the same noise, it won't work.
Something
like CONCLUSION:
If you're searching for very precises
songs (Very underground recordings that are not in the database,
unofficial recordings...) or tracks from a damaged support (A tape/
vynil that plays a bit accelerated or "strange") you won't
have good results. But
if you think about probabilities, I imagine most of users will probably
request songs released the last years (Or quite famous
ones), or something they heard on Tv, so a good
part of requests will have good resulsts.
Now, if you can afford
an "Hail phone", if you agree to create an account giving
your bank account number, this could be a nice software to test.
