Doug’s World

What’s The Name of This Song?

We were sitting at the bar at Northern Quest Casino late Saturday night and a song started playing. “What’s the name of this song?” Patti asked. It sounded vaguely familiar, but none of us could place it.

Unbeknownst to me, I had the solution right on my hand, with my Cingular cell phone. I could have pressed #43, held up my phone to let it “listen” for a while, then hung up. And I would have received a text message a little while later, telling me the name of the song and the artist who recorded it. How cool is that?

It costs $.99 per song, and there’s no charge if they can’t identify the song. You can use any portion of the song to identify it. So I’d guess that they have a big database of songs, and they do some type of low-fidelity matching (to eliminate ambient noise) that find a match for your sample within the database.

I learned about this on an internal email DL, and apparently there are several of these services available. There’s the Cingular service, a service offered in Australia, and a site where you can just tap out the rhythm of a song and have it identified from that.

This is a great example of creative thinking about how to use digital technology to create new systems that offer new types of services. And the technologies required for this particular service have been around for a while: all that’s new here is the way they’ve been combined into an easy-to-use integrated service.

What else could we be doing with our cell phones that we haven’t envisioned yet?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 10:09 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.