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A friend in the phone

The son and I had stopped at the local pub for a pint. He was in the middle of a story when I held up my hand. “Wait a sec,” I said. “What’s that song? I really like it.” The son grabbed his phone. “I could tell you,” he said.
Barbara Gunn
Barbara Gunn

The son and I had stopped at the local pub for a pint.

He was in the middle of a story when I held up my hand.

“Wait a sec,” I said. “What’s that song? I really like it.”

The son grabbed his phone.

“I could tell you,” he said. “But why don’t we Shazam it instead?”

“Why don’t we what?” I asked.

“Shazam it,” he said. “You’ve never heard of Shazam?”

He was incredulous — and apparently, justifiably. Turns out I was extremely late — as in years — to the Shazam party.

The son tapped an app on his phone and held it up. Then the phone — and I know this sounds ridiculous — started listening.

It listened. It listened some more. And then it told us the song was called Creep and that the band was Radiohead.

“How does it do that?” I asked.

“No idea,” he shrugged.

I decided to find out. I consulted Google, the mother of all search masters, and was told that Shazam “identifies songs based on an audio fingerprint based on a time-frequency graph called a spectrogram.”

Alrighty then.

“Let’s do another one,” I said to the son. Shazam went to work. Paper Bag by Fiona Apple. Blue Monday by New Order. Foolish by Ashanti.

“How does it do that?” I repeated. I turned the son’s phone over and over in my hand, looking for a Lilliputian DJ to emerge. Surely, a friendly one lived inside, one with a massive musical playlist.

“Let’s get Shazam on your phone,” said the son.

He picked up my iPhone, and began to tap away madly.

“There,” he said, returning my device. “You’re Shazam-ed.”

I set my Shazam to work. I discovered there’s a song called Try Again by someone named Aaliyah. I learned that someone named Shakira did a song called Whenever, Wherever.

I even assigned my iPhone DJ to songs I already knew.

“What are you doing?” asked the son, who’d ordered another brew.

I was holding my phone in the air so it could listen.

“You know that song,” said the son. “Everyone knows that song. It’s Desperado.”

“I know that,” I whispered. “I’m just testing my Shazam.”

Shazam passed with flying colours: Eagles, it said.

Amazing, I thought. And to think that for years, other folks have been Shazam-ing tunes, while I haven’t had a clue.

Thanks to the son, though, those days are gone. From here on, I’ll always know the name of a song — all because of that friend in my phone.