Shazam, We Genie

Attention nerds: Slate just published a pretty great feature about how the popular Shazam application works on Monday.

Just to give you a taste:

Shazam creates a spectrogram for each song in its database—a graph that plots three dimensions of music: frequency vs. amplitude vs. time. The algorithm then picks out just those points that represent the peaks of the graph—notes that contain 'higher energy content' than all the other notes around it...In practice, this seems to work out to about three data points per second per song.

Ahem, speaking of 'high energy content'...