HOW THE HECK DOES SHAZAM WORK? (AN INTERACTIVE EXPLORATION)

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

Shazam identifies songs by converting audio waveforms into spectrograms and extracting "peak" frequencies to create a sparse constellation map. These peaks are paired to generate unique fingerprint hashes based on their frequencies and the precise time intervals between them. The system confirms a match when it finds consistent timing between the user's clip and a known song by comparing these hashes against a massive database.