Music Therapy Today - World Federation of Music Therapy

Music fingerprinting system is fastest yet
MusicIP, based in California, US, announced last week that it had
received a US patent for its method of automatically identifying, or "fin-
gerprinting", digital music files.
The company already offers software that analyses the music collection
on a computer, identifies it, and makes recommendations.
But now it will now offer its music identification feature for other com-
panies to include in their products.
The system can recognise a song from its audio "fingerprint" in a fraction
of a second. This allows users to rapidly organise their music collection,
discover more about a particular track or get new recommendations,
through connected databases, regardless of the format of the audio file.
DOMINANT TONES Matthew Dunn, chief executive of MusicIP, claims his company's finger-
printing technology is the fastest available and uses the largest commer-
cial database – containing 17 million songs.
To make a fingerprint, MusicIP quickly scans the first 2 minutes of a
track and records frequency data every 185 milliseconds, before com-
pressing the results into a 512 byte file. It also measures records the four
most dominant tones in the first 30 seconds of the music.
The program uses information about these dominant tones to narrow the
search before searching the song database using the frequency informa-
tion. Dunn says this allows the company to perform hundreds of searches
each second and that the service is sensitive enough to distinguish
between different versions of the same tune, such as live and studio
recordings.
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