iPhone apps: Testing Shazam's limits - classical music
Instead of trying to scrawl down lyrics, doing a search on Google (only to be lead to some bizarre lyric website repository that may or may not work, all the while offering me free ringtones and ceaseless pop-up ads), with Shazam's app, I've actually found songs by, well, listening to them. Shazam is slick. You hear a song, start the app, hold your iPhone's mic up to the sound source and viola! It's been 'tagged' and identified like a wild bird you caught on Animal Planet. Another app by Midomi even lets you hum a tune in, search by title, artist and even lets you listen to samples.
Sending the sample for off-site sonic analysis, querying the proper artist remotely, album art and sending a response back to your iPhone in less than 10 seconds is pretty dang slick. The sample time itself is only about 12 seconds! Once you get your result, you can bookmark it, and, if you're in a WiFi hotspot, launch iTunes to buy the song. Most popular songs are on these services. Shazam doesn't work in loud places like clubs, bars or restaurants, but works well in cars or at home.
What these services haven't been able to do, however, is to analyze classical music. I've tried a few times. Shazam says the Beethoven Fifth Symhony is "unrecognized." What would Ludwig say? After humming the piece into Midomi, I got the strangest country folk song in response. This isn't surprising. There are very long phrases in classical music and it makes even die-hard fans puzzle as to "what was that piece?" Having these services decipher classical music presents a lot of challenges. First, recordings of pieces are almost nearly indistinguishable especially if you only had a 12-second sample of them. Also, unlike pop music, where there is one artist performing one song (sure there are cover versions), with classical you have hundreds of ensembles, conductors and performers spanning 50 years of audio recording doing the same 'song' over and over again. For example, there are more than 200 recordings of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony alone!
When (or if) classical music can be deciphered by these types of services it will probably be a great engineering feat. Progress, if this is ever attempted, would probably be incremental. First, identifying a particular symphony, concerto or quartet is, in itself, very difficult. Next, identifying the particular recording will be staggering. All those ensembles and conductors perform pieces many times over leading to various versions and editions that would be a morass of data to sort through. While there's probably not a market demand for this type of service or application, it may serve as Shazam or Midomi's Everest.
Kevin Ho is a San Francisco attorney and the owner of a brand new iPhone. He'll be writing about the experience for the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
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The bad news is that Shazam does not have the world's classical music in its fingerprint database. Why? Because, unfortunately there has been very litle demand for this and there is a very high cost to adding the tremendous amount of classical music out there. One day there may be enough awareness of Shazam with enough classical music enthusiasts who also want to use Shazam regularly to justify this investment. Let's hope that day is soon!
Chris Barton
Co-Founder of Shazam Entertainment Ltd.
What Chris Barton said about the disparity between demand for classical music and the cost of adding it makes sense. Sad, but true. One of the great things about what's happening in the music industry currently, though, is that people are finding music in nontraditional ways (ie not just radio and CDs etc) and the niche communities that cater to less mainstream genres like classical, world music, or indie rock are growing quickly.
As Shazam and other technologies gain visibility, and more of the classical music lovers come out of the woodwork I'm sure the accessibility of classical music online will improve.
At MixMatchMusic (www.mixmatchmusic.com) we are hoping for the same thing. While we expect most of our early users to be musicians/fans with hip hop or electronica roots (since those two genres are more likely to be created digitally and promoted online), ultimately we hope to grow to include content from the less traditionally-digital genres that don't necessarily have a huge presence online. It will be awesome to have some solid classical, folk, jazz, world, and punk music in our community for the hip hop and electronica fans to mix together.
Fusion of unlikely genres sometimes creates the most exciting new developments and sounds.
Go Shazam! One day you will find Beethoven in high demand!
Don't sweat the small stuff! Pick the "most downloaded" or whatever for the linked version, I'm sure that will be suitable for most. If not, they can research and choose a different artist later, now that thanks to your software they know what they're looking for. We are OUT of the woodwork and we'd love this software for what it really seems most designed to do....