Computer Plays 'Name that Tune'
Every song has unique audio fingerprints, and now computers can quickly match what they "hear" with some enormous musical databases.

Identifying songs has always been the source of power & prestige at parties and on quiz shows. These days there are other reasons to figure out what's playing on the radio, in a club, or over a store's speaker system.

In addition to individuals who are becoming accustomed to - and learning to expect - useful tricks from their tech, companies often need to know what music is being played.

For example, the organizations responsible for collecting and distributing royalties to songwriters and performers have the unenviable task of doing so in a world awash with music. How to scale up the process?

Philips Electronics recently demonstrated a prototype Internet radio that can precisely identify music as it streams past - artist, song, even specific recorded version.

They is not alone. Using mathematical descriptions of the unique features of a song, its audio fingerprints, many companies are actively working to perfect and sell their own versions of the technology. Each takes a somewhat different approach to overcoming the main challenges to real-world applications. Apart from time and money, these include bad listening conditions, poor sound systems, compressed or otherwise altered songs (Did you know that broadcasters sometimes speed up songs a bit to get them over with quicker? "Bring on the next commercial!")

Some are already on the market. Thanks to Shazam Entertainment, Britons can now hold up their cell phones to a piece of music to "tag" it - and then retrieve a match from Shazam's 1.6 million tune database. (Of course, Shazam is also perfectly happy to sell them a copy of that song, too!) TunePrint and Audible Magic are also in the hunt.

Additional benefits of these databases are having a reliable source of information for archivists and even individuals with large collections of music.

However, most consumers seem to want to overcome the main problem cited by Cary Sherman (President of the Recording Industry Assn. of America) in a recent New York Times article: "Radios often don't bother to tell listeners what they have played."

Link to the New York Times articles

Link to company reports on audio fingerprinting at Philips Electronics, Shazam, TunePrint, and Audible Magic