My Experience with Shazam and music

 Summary

The author has been using Shazam since 2015 or 2016, and discovered it after purchasing a smartphone in 2017. They conducted research trips to SEA, recording high-quality music from Chinese Cantonese, Malaysian Hindi, Thai, and Tamil. They identified 10 Hindi songs out of 11 and 43 Chinese songs out of 57. They also used a smaller collection of 52 songs to test Shazam's performance with newer songs, finding 19 unidentified songs out of 49 with 66% success.

 

The text describes a report on Shazam on 2000 Singapore, focusing on poor FM listening conditions and results. The author notes that over 50% of recordings were unsuitable for listening and a few were completely unusable. The report includes 189 mp3 recordings, with 72 identified (40%) and 57 known as singers or songs (31%). The author also mentions a test conducted on 23 using Spore and Klasik FM Malaysia, with a total of eight songs played. The text concludes that most songs from that era are played on Klassik or other streaming stations, with the few unIDed or unshazamed songs being uninteresting.

Full TEXT

 

 

Older Music 1989

 

Shazam is a program that I have known for a long time, since around 2015 or 2016, although I started using it after 2018 or 2019. I have a keen interest in finding and identifying Malaysian music, and I discovered the program shortly after purchasing my second smartphone, the Redmi 5A, at the end of 2017. Shazam was one of the first programs that I added and connected to my Google account.

Soon after testing the 1989 collection, I conducted my first research trip to SEA for both business and to record a series of 7 C90 cassettes in HK, Bangkok, Singapore, and Phuket. These locations provided a unique opportunity to listen to high-quality music, including Chinese Cantonese, Malaysian Hindi, Thai, and Tamil music. Although much of the music was similar to Western standards, it was still very enjoyable.

I continue by copy pasting my results from my canceled book due to the very low input of orders, it seems  that people prefer to be freebies than support a writer:

My results are as follows:

·        10 IDed Hindi songs out of 11 (91% success the remain also well known)

·        43 IDed Chinese songs out of 57 (75%)

·        29 IDed Thai songs out of 64 (44%)

·        14 IDed Malay out of 36 (39%)

·        In HK:  5 IDed and 2 not

·        2 false results!

(IDed = identified)

 

Seven songs have been excluded from the list, including three Chinese, two Thai, and three Malay.   These songs were included in albums purchased at the same time. The Malay albums were purchased later, but before 2000.

 

Part 2 collection from a friend on 97

 

Back in the early days of the internet, I communicated with several Malay people around the world. One of them sent me a few C90 tapes with music recorded from FM radio in Singapore, if I'm not mistaken. These tapes were incredibly important to me and I played them so many times that if they were on a CD player, it would be completely worn out due to overuse!

The tape was later converted to MP3 and stored in a CD bag with other collections. It was also played on an MP3 player multiple times.

After checking my first music collection of 89 songs with Shazam, I used this smaller collection of around 52 songs to test if and how Shazam performs better with newer songs. This experiment was conducted as the previous one had little success with Malay music.

The cassettes contain 19 songs from singer collections and 33 songs from radio. One of them is in English (Braxton's 'Unbreak My Heart' rated '6'). Less than 20 songs are required for identification of these 52 songs. There was one false result, but it was corrected after replaying.

Here are  the results :

Two songs are in double / one mix-up with 4 songs measured each one separately

• 19 unIDed out of 49 Rating   = 66% success , higher than the 89 collection
• 8 of these unIDed  known to me 3-4 are hits of the time  .
• 8 mutually unknown  
• 1 singer (4 songs) out of 3 missing in full .
• 6 new titles  from Shazam from my previously missing titles

 

Shazam on 2000 Singapore only

I am maintaining the same format as the 89 report, although the emotional ratings and technical information are now shown less. The reason for this will be explained below.

The FM listening conditions and results were quite poor. At one point, Singapore's FM band was congested with radio stations, many of which had strong signals. This caused cross-station interference and mysterious cracking sounds that sometimes severely deteriorated reception, as heard in the recordings.

It has been a long time since I made these recordings, so everything may have been lost to time or deleted from any listings used to record the music. If you were near me, you would surely laugh at me using two tape recorders at the same time, with one earbud struggling to listen to the start and end of each song so that I could start or stop the recording. The only thing I can remember was when Klassik National identified and played a well-known ballad rock song from the past.

More than 50% of the recordings were unsuitable for listening, and a few were completely unusable. I rarely use it for listening because the sound is annoying.

Short recordings were made on around 10 tapes over the course of three days. Is this a Guinness record?

Total mp3: 189 minus 9 'snippets' (short rippings )

·       72 of them IDed (40%)

·      57 of them known to me as singers or songs  (31%)   That time i already knew around 100 singers or groups

·        15 of  common  IDed and   Shazam

·        Around 10 nasyid songs (islamic music )

·        Venus  form bananarama is not listed

·        I shazamed a short 5-second part of an Indian song. It was one of the 4 songs that were quickly identified by Shazam.

·        Additionally, there were 7 old Indonesian songs from hot listings, one remix of an Indo dangdut song,

·        and a hymn called 'Terima Kasih Malaysia' supposedly from Nasional FM for the One Malaysia program.

I also shazamed a dikir song, which is a style of acapella singing accompanied by a drum. I personally dislike this style, and it is similar to the style found in some places in Northern Nigeria, which I find even worse.

Due to poor audio quality and recording conditions, not all songs could be emotionally rated. Only around 6 songs received a rating of 6. Because of the low ID level, a second check was conducted in a quieter environment, which yielded only one additional song. However, Shazam performed well even under strong interference. The first Shazaming was conducted under noise levels of nearly 70-75 dB.

Final Notice: Time traveling to the year 2000 may seem rather useless. Most of the songs that I know today are from that era and are played many times on Klassik or other streaming stations. The few unIDed  or unshazamed songs are rather uninteresting.

2019 from recordings  (added 6/1) 

Testing an older recording of a program from Klassik FM that was saved on the laptop in 2019 (at the time when the PC was replaced by the laptop).

The file was quickly searched using Shazam, resulting in the identification of a total of 23 songs, with a combined duration of 106 minutes, starting at 19:20 UTC, as noted in the file's time signature.

Among the identified songs, there was one English song at the beginning of the recording, which was likely inadvertently recorded from another station. Of the 11 recognized songs, a few were already known to the writer. One song was not initially recognized but one of the picks to the writer. However, 10 songs remained unidentified after being tested one or two times before skipping to the next song.

Short Test on 2023

This  is a short test made on the end of 23  This test started with Warna on 2030 -2100 then changed to Klasik until 2200 local time

Warna Singapore

During this 30-minute session, there was a mix of songs from both Indonesia and Malaysia, along with several short advertisements. There were a total of eight songs played, although one was not identified. Of the remaining seven songs, two were from Indonesia and the other five were from Malaysia.

 

Klasik FM Malaysia

This was a roughly two-hour listening session with some self-promotion and short timed intervals of other programs, one of which is usually on from 4-9 pm.

From this session, eight songs were not identified by Shazam, with three of them giving false results. The one at 11:23 pm gave two Western songs: 'Family Time' by Spence and 'Plain Trum' by Demi Yates. Another one at 9:45 pm played the songs 'All of You' by A. Davis and 'Good Moving' by Symphonic.

If someone is interested in the ful shazamed song listing I will be very glad to post it later.  

 

The above text except  the bottom  is part of an ceased book “30 years Malaysia  “ due to an extremely low ROI. Its very bad that only a handful out of 700 watched the promo , bought  the book.