News Stories

Identify Music With Your Cellphone

When you hear a song you like on the radio, but the DJ doesn?t identify it, the researchers at Philips have come up with a new service that will get you the name of it. While the music is playing, you dial the number of the service provider and place your cellphone near the radio or TV speaker. A computer system analyses the music and compares it with a huge music database. Moments later, you should get a message on your phone naming the song. It will even let you buy the CD over your cellphone using an e-commerce transaction.

Philips will create a unique fingerprint for each piece of music so it doesn?t have to store the whole song. To do this, its technology divides the sound of a song or instrumental piece into 33 narrow frequency bands and then measures the energy in each band. With these measurements the company can find codes that are unique to each piece of music.

They want to set up a central database of representing 100,000 commercially available recordings. When a cellphone sends the sound of unknown music to the database, the database will compare the incoming sound with its stored codes and send back a text message identifying the song. Three seconds of a song will be enough to identify it, so you?ll have plenty of time to dial the server while the music is still playing.


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