The idea started when one of the company’s founders wanted to be able to identify a particular guitar riff and thought there would be value in creating an algorithm that could identify music that was sung or hummed. Soon thereafter, that idea merged with the concept of creating technology that could identify recorded music. Today, SoundHound is about enabling people around the world to identify any type of sound, whether it’s created originally or recorded.(Katie McMahon, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, SoundHound, April 9, 2013)
Around the time of The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s final episode, in March of 1977, I was hanging out with one of my older brothers in our driveway. I loved the show’s theme song, especially the drum fill in the opening bars before the proper melody begins. I used to hum the song to myself on the way to school and back, out playing in the yard or on my bike, dumming da-dumming that cool drum part out loud. One day it occurred to me that I was going to hear that theme for the last time in my life. This was one of the first instances as a kid when I was confronted with irreplaceable loss—goldfish renewed themselves with a visit to the pet store; flat tires were pumped with air; my best friend Karl had moved away three years earlier, but we kept up with letters. This drum fill was going to simply vanish, never to be heard again, destined to live on only in the melancholy needle-drops of memory. I told my brother that I could barely wait to hear the theme for the last time. He told me he was going to talk out loud over that part so that I’d miss it.
The implications are overwhelmingly positive. Users want that instant gratification of being able to identify a song they hear and like, whether they are in their car, a bar, a sports stadium, etc. And with SoundHound, that’s exactly what they get. Moreover, the rich feature set, including LiveLryics—another SoundHound Inc.–created technology—has the impact of reinvigorating the love of lyrics and helps anyone who wants to learn the words of a song. Our fans have told us that SoundHound LiveLyrics are to aspiring singers what Guitar Hero is to the aspiring guitarist. (McMahon)
The agony! (My brother knew what he was doing.) If he talked over the song so I couldn’t hear it, that meant that I’d already heard it for the last time. I can’t remember whether or not my brother did what he promised. Dali: “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.” This gem—whether or not a brother was unkind—I’ve lost for good.
Applications like SoundHound not only help people discover and share new music but, in many ways, they also help reacquaint users with music from earlier times in their lives. Many SoundHounders use the app to capture a song they may not have heard for several years but now want to add to their playlist or listen to it, buy, or stream the track. So it is also a tool that aids in memory and reminiscence. (McMahon)
Plutarch wrote “Consolation To His Wife” in the first century, when he and his spouse, separated by many miles, were awash in the grief of losing their small child. They bore weeks apart as their letters to each other slowly, agonizingly arrived, each missive weighted with anticipation and desire, love and loneliness. “The messenger you sent with tidings of the death of our little daughter apparently missed me on his road to Athens, and consequently I learned about the child only when I arrived in Tanagra,” Plutarch writes, adding: “I suppose that the funeral has already taken place.” Imagine such an interval.
Music is often associated with specific moments and memories, and technologies like SoundHound and the feature set provide a way for users to capture, catalogue, and create music memories that live onward and can have interactions that go beyond the moment in time. (McMahon)
Within months of The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s final airing, the sitcom began invading our sunny afternoons; at one point, channel 5, the Washington, D.C., NBC affiliate station, was airing up to three episodes in a row in daytime, under clustered themes such as “Lou’s Lu-Lu’s!” But at that age I didn’t really understand reruns, where they came from, who was in charge of them, why they happened—if they’d happen—except that Get Smart! and My Three Sons were great, and we were blessed when they were beamed into our rec rooms every afternoon, those broadcasts originating from faraway Baltimore caught, tenuously, by a movable antenna on our roof that we activated from a console atop our TV set. I pictured the antenna rotating slowly toward invisible radio waves.
SoundHound makes it possible for people to discover, enjoy, and share new music almost instantaneously. This is a dramatic change from the days of having to wait for a song on the radio to end in the hopes the on-air DJ will broadcast the name of the song and artist. At the same time, the wholly unique feature of Sing/Hum recognition may have impact that spurs people to test their ability to process what they have previously heard and provide their own rendition in [an] attempt to have it matched against SoundHound.” (McMahon)
As one might expect, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to fans ruining the show for other fans by insisting on watching the entire performance in the glowing light of their smartphone screens. Ahead of a recent show at Webster Hall, the trio posted a sign up front urging fans to ditch their ‘smart device’ in favor of a more intelligent show-viewing experience.
‘PLEASE DO NOT WATCH THE SHOW THROUGH A SCREEN ON YOUR SMART DEVICE/CAMERA,’
read the literal sign-of-the-times.
‘PUT THAT SHIT AWAY
as a courtesy to the person behind you and to Nick, Karen, and Brian.
MUCH LOVE AND MANY THANKS! YEAH YEAH YEAHS.’
According to a SPIN magazine staffer who was at the show, vocalist Karen O vocalized the appeal near the start of the set by allowing the audience to take photos for a few minutes, before instructing them to ‘put those motherfuckers away.’” (Gawker, April 8, 2013)
Since its beginning, Shazam believed in leveraging the power of mobile technology to enable music discovery, because mobile goes with you, wherever you are, whether you’re in a quiet coffee shop or a noisy club. In a lot of ways, it was an idea and a technology that was almost a decade ahead of its time. When Shazam launched, all people had to do was dial 2580 on their phone and Shazam would send an SMS text message of the song name and artist. With the release of Shazam as an app in 2008, it became even easier—now, all people have to do is open Shazam and point it to the music playing to get the song and artist, album artwork, links to YouTube, and social sharing with Facebook and Twitter. (Will Mills, Vice President of Music and Content, Shazam, June 9, 2013)
“Man is an imagining being.” (Gaston Bachelard)
“Hold your phone toward the music and select Tag Now.”
Young Caucasians had played, I think. The 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., was at its dark, sweaty best. I was with friends, but at the end of the night my circle of buddies had dissolved in that wonderfully messy way that things dissolve in your twenties, friends vanishing, friendly strangers materializing, values morphing in the smoke, boundaries among intimates stretching, redefining with each beer, each snort of coke, each band, your ringing ears scoring it all. Startlingly, the person standing next to me as the show closed down was a girl from one of my classes, a cute blonde I’d had some conversations with in the classroom. She turned to me after the last song, looked directly in my eyes, cupped my cheek with her soft hand, and sighed. She turned, left, and vanished.
Since its launch in iTunes, Shazam has been one of the apps that people love to show off to their friends, which is why its growth has been driven primarily by word-of-mouth rather than marketing. The service helps people quickly and easily discover the music they like, then go on to purchase it, which benefits them as well as supports the music industry in general. In fact, Shazam drives more than $300 million in digital music sales—that’s ten percent of global music sales. Additionally, people can easily share their finds with friends—they don’t need to hum the song or remember the lyrics—they can simply share their tag on Facebook or Twitter. (Mills)
My boyish waiting for the afternoon reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show involved—well, waiting. We’re aware at the hyperspeed by which we live our lives: when virtually anything happens now in, say, the remote countryside of France, or in Iraq, I can know about it within seconds. This is staggering news. This is, also, not news. Lamenting the lightspeed of culture is already a dated complaint, fading in the bright gleam of new and wonderful technological advances.
Shazam is an established verb now, with many other companies describing themselves as the ‘Shazam for real estate, etc.,’ and this mindshare and market dominance in music and now TV and advertising is something we’re very proud of. As Shazam evolves, expect more that future generations can do with music and media you’ve engaged with on our service. Shazam has certainly helped break artists at a faster pace than previously, and also helped artists who could have previously not got a large audience, get traction. (Mills)
My wife and I rented a car recently to drive from Illinois to Maryland to visit family. The vehicle came equipped with satellite radio. We tentatively played around with the radio during the opening leg of the trip, at first overwhelmed, then amused, by the range of station choices: ’60s on 6, ’70s on 7, ’80s on 8. All Elvis, All Day? Broadcast poolside from Graceland? Yes, please. But we were soon disappointed by the numbingly repeated songs and the innumerable commercials. Ditto with All Sinatra, All The Time.
It didn’t take long for me to remember that there are Major League Baseball stations on satellite radio. Having access to every game played that day and night filled me with head-lifting joy. I switched among games being played on the east coast and in the Midwest, learned what west coast match-ups I could anticipate listening to tonight if we were still driving, our headlights boring bright holes in the dark. Home announcers, regional commercials, dozens of games, hundreds and hundreds of plays described, visualized.
I didn’t anticipate that, oddly, I’d miss the vanishing of a radio signal as we went through the tunnel in the Alleghany Mountains, the game’s reception drifting away as we drove on, static interrupting the announcers, their voices adrift in white noise, the game left to be played in my imagination, the inning truncated by geography and signal range, now a transparency draped over memories of another game, and still another, infinite layers of recollections and affection originating in loss—until the present voices resume as we leave the tunnel. There are two outs now.
“I know.”
“Killer song.”
“I can’t remember what album it’s on, the first one? That doesn’t sound right.”
“Can’t remember.”
“I think.”
We look down at our phones, sitting dark on the table.
“Oh man, cool song.”
“What is it? I can’t make it out.”
“You know, it’s...Fuck, what’s his name? God, I can picture him. Can’t remember. Anyway. Awesome song.”
“Oh right, I think I know this.” I look at the speakers. “Is it the jukebox?”
“No, it’s a mix CD at the bar, I think. Jukebox’s busted.”
We glance at the bartender who’s solo, and harried, serving patrons three deep. We look down at our phones.
Shazam has fundamentally democratised music discovery and empowered hundreds of millions of people to engage with any music whenever and wherever they hear it. There are very few people—if no one on earth— who could recognize the huge volume and variety of music that Shazam can. This is a seismic shift that has not only invented a new category of consumer behaviour with music, but also with television (primarily with people Shazam’ing their TV to engage with the music) but evolving beyond this at pace. (Mills)
Kate was dating another DJ at WMUC, the University of Maryland campus radio station, where, as a senior, I had a coveted Friday afternoon 3 to 6 shift. She called the studio during my show and asked if I wanted to hang out afterward at Town Hall, a gray-cement townie bar on Route One. I had a girlfriend but a secret crush on Kate, who had long, stick-straight reddish-brown hair and didn’t wear much makeup. She was a painting major. Her nose was nice, probably too large for her, and her eyes were blue and active. She was quiet, but dry and cynical. She was cigarette-y and sexy. I said sure. A couple of hours later, over pitchers of beer, she shared stories of growing up in nearby Greenbelt, of living in a lower-middle-class family, of struggles and low ceilings in a concrete suburbia. Neither of us mentioned our significant others as we got very drunk and smoked and laughed. I drove her home, and we parked in front of her house and made out for hours while the oldies station played on the car radio. Several times we got close to pushing beyond what either of us was actually ready for, then cooled off and de-fogged the windshield by pulling away, joking, listening to the radio, to Chuck Berry and The Four Seasons and Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon and The Everly Brothers and Stax and Motown. She rolled her eyes at the corny songs, sang along to the Four Tops, and for several minutes essayed The Drifters’ “Up On The Roof” as a coded paean to teenage suicide. At that time, in that place, with my hands around her waist and her taste on my lips, her theory seemed novel, and brilliant. We fooled around some more, and the car battery died. Neither of us had money or the wherewithal to secure a tow truck, so she invited me to spend the night on her bedroom floor. She came out of her bathroom wearing pajamas, smelling of Marlboro’s and Colgate, and smiling sheepishly. I slept on the floor next to her bed. I was in the bedroom of a girl I didn’t know. The next morning she asked me for ten dollars.
A couple of weeks later, I drove slowly past Kate’s house, then hit I-495, the Beltway through Maryland and Virginia, and for a couple of hours circled Washington, D.C., drinking a six-pack of Schaefer, listening to the oldies station. The songs that night scored a pathetic evening of remorse and lurid imagination, singing in pop changes a story I made up and made myself believe, of acting nobly, charitably, ignoring the truths that every other song dangerously skirted. That playlist is long gone, irreplaceable, broadcast through night air from some remote place. For those aimless hours, no other arrangement of tunes could have mattered, could have approached the songbook of twenty-something sorrow they achieved as I dipped in and out of music, loudly singing along to songs I couldn’t replay, believing their promises and then bitterly denouncing them, and drove around and around. Kate’s body and voice, the songs that reshaped them, ghosted the car. The music was intense in its presentness, issuing from speakers and leaking out of windows and trailing me like exhaust. That they were here and gone—in the car with me, then not—only made the heartbreak of their arrival, full of promises and good times, worse. Or sweeter. These songs weren’t in my pocket. They were gone.
I stored that drive’s soundtrack in my head for a long time, played it on occasion, as if rifling through a box of 45s, but the list grew and shrank, had songs added, deleted. Songs disappeared. My imagination stoked that night’s playlist the way memory required. In this century, I could’ve aimed my phone at the car speakers, ID’d each song, posted them as wretched updates to Facebook, had a real-time curating of a sad and solitary night. Now it feels as if loss is replaced instantly by everythingness. Which document is greater, I wonder, which more lasting? Memory’s shape-shifting hard drive, or the humming circuits of my iPhone? That I’m skeptical in each direction, that my answer lay somewhere in the middle, occasioned this essay.
“How much of human life is lost in waiting.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Digital photography apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram offer lenses and film stock that promise a kind of instant nostalgia, a way to frame the present moment as if it’s come to us from the past and is, thus, weighted with value, having endured the long, emotional journey from then to now. Snapchat seems to want to go the other way, to offer a digital simulation of perishability. This app will reverse the infinity vortex of the Internet. Imagine throwing that shoebox stuffed with Polaroids into the fire, scattering your love letters in the river, deleting the past with impunity, leaving no traces. Anti-Save. This image will vanish in seconds.
To use Snapchat, you download the Apple or Android app, find your contacts, and start taking photos or videos. You determine how long they can be viewed—from 1 to 10 seconds. The ‘snaps’ are then deleted from Snapchat servers. But that doesn’t mean they always disappear. A recipient can take a screen shot, saving it forever, if they like. Other workarounds have also popped up on the Web. YouTube is full of videos of Snapchat users making quick, funny faces. There’s also a not-suitable-for-work Facebook page called ‘Snapchat Nudes.’ [Snapchat CEO Evan] Spiegel insists his service isn’t all about sex. Mention Snapchat to consumers, and teens and young adults light up.
Jennifer Yvette Leiva of Anaheim, California, enjoys it for the timed photos. ‘You like to goof around and not have people throw the pictures back in your face,’ she says.
‘It’s an easy way to keep in touch with your friends,’ says Brooke Bower of San Diego. (“Snapchat’s young audience fuels a growth streak,” USA Today, June 5, 2013)
But what’s really gone for good?
“Yet another way to retrieve deleted Snapchat photos.” (Salon.com, June 4, 2013)
In June of 2001, I traveled with The Fleshtones on a five-city tour of the Midwest. In Cleveland, I woke up on the floor of the promoter’s house, a large, three-story lakeside home caked with matted cat hair. I was tired and hungover. Bleary-eyed, I glanced across the room and saw singer Peter Zaremba lying on a ratty couch. He stretched and looked miserable. “Bonomo, I’m too old for this shit,” he said, as much to himself as to me.
An hour later in the living room our little kit bags are packed and we’re set to say Thanks to our hosts and pile back into the crowded van—when the quiet is assaulted by a loud song someone put on the turntable. Its anthemic rush and sixteenth-notes knife through my hangover. Within a minute I feel jolted awake. By the end of the number, I feel redeemed. Who is this?
“Detroit Cobras,” the bass player Ken Fox said, reading my mind. “It’s an old Mickey Lee Lane tune. They call it “Hey Sailor.” We just called it “Hey Sah-Lo-Ney” when we did it.”
Into the van we went. We headed south toward Columbus on the gray interstate in front of menacing storm clouds, and I played and replayed the song in my head, its B12 sonic boost still coursing through my sorry veins. I had to hear that song again. I knew I would within a few days, maybe even later that night. The wait felt Biblical.
“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” (Miles Davis)
The iPod has fundamentally changed listening to music while traveling. Before, on road trips, I’d have to bring along a clumsy, oversized wallet stuffed with CDs; halfway through the drive I’d invariably regret not bringing, say, the Pow City! Compilation, when, on I-80, I craved Johnny Jones & The King Casuals’ “It’s Gonna Be Good.” As of this writing, I have 17, 894 songs on my iPod, from the A-Bones to ZZ Top. I’d have to drive 39.3 days consecutively, twenty-four hours a day, in order to listen to every song. This is an absurdly wonderful idea.
Yet, here are my Old-Man-Shakes-Fist-At-iCloud questions: Do I love a song more that I have to wait to posses? Do I care more for the eBay-won 45 that took ten days to arrive in my mailbox than for the MP3 acquired in moments?
People use Shazam to help build the soundtrack of their lives. And by having the music recognised by our service, that creates something that was previously ephemeral in your mind as a memory, and puts this as a quantifiable result into the device you spend most time with. And not only does this then frictionlessly allow you to purchase that music (further cementing your relationship with the music you might have not heard again), but also share this memory with friends via social networks on Shazam’s own social friends feed. (Mills)
Waiting is a condition of being alive, a kind of simmering that allows desire and anticipation and fear and regret and imagination to steep as their maddening flavor profile matures. Waiting has been radically altered in contemporary life, its contours reimagined, the intervals between wanting and getting, losing and regaining, contracting very rapidly. I wonder if we’re on the way to solving desire.
For the Whitney Biennial this year, Yukinori Yanagi, a Japanese-born conceptual artist, created two pieces with the help of some ants. For one, Mr. Yanagi assembled a replica of Jasper Johns’s Three Flags by pouring red, white, and blue sand into three Plexiglass boxes. Then he poured in live ants, inviting them to tunnel through the sand. As the ant farm got busy, the flag began to collapse. (“Animals Have Taken Over Art, And Art Wonders Why; Metaphors Run Wild, but Sometimes a Cow Is Just a Cow,” The New York Times, June 24, 2000)
Wait and see.
Dusk at the International Bar on First Avenue in Manhattan. I’m sitting at my favorite table, nearest to the front door, three feet from the well-stocked jukebox, over which I have benevolent control this June late-afternoon, Jonathan Richman, The Kinks, The Jam, Beatles ’65, the Buzzcocks, and Chicago blues issuing into the bar that was characteristically so dark when I walked in that I instinctively put out my hands, my eyes adjusting soon to find the always-friendly, always-laughing Linda, who served me a cold can of Schaefer (three bucks). I took it to the front table and watched the people traffic by as songs slowly brightened the place, competing with the loud regulars up front who mistook my DeKalb Flying Corn T-shirt for the street in Brooklyn, for the street in the Bronx, they’re everywhere!
But as usual I duck the small talk to sit for a couple hours after an afternoon of work, to look out the window and to think and soak in the tunes and the three or so cans of beer I’ll drink and love, leaving regretfully across the creaking wood floor after Thanks! and See ya’s! out into the dimming sunshine on the street which, after the hospitality and quiet, friendly dark of the soothing bar, feels warm and vibrant, somehow more welcome.
Before I left, someone selected a doo-wop song on the jukebox, a tune I’d never heard before, and it played in the background as I scribbled something in my notebook—but the last minute or so snagged me in its splendor and floating grace, an ending so exquisite in its pretty changes, heart-in-the-throat cadences and harmonies that I teared up. God, who is this? The song ended before I could dash over and look—there is no “last played” feature on this jukebox, and there was more than one doo-wop CD in the machine. I didn’t catch enough of the song to even guess at a title, and it was too late to use my phone. I left the bar humming bare traces, the final moments of the song like excavated bones, already fading in the daylight, in the archeology of my head. I went sifting and sifting, remembering and longing, all night.
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, and, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.
Photo by Karolina Grabowska