you look like a field of buttercups in a suit

               When we talk about search engines, the first thing that will come to people’s mind will usually be Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Yet, there’s actually a lot of search engines that is specified for particular types. It could be video-search, such as Youtube, film-search; IMDB, book-search; Goodreads, music search, or any type of search on the internet. These search engines are usually provided in the shape of an application to help user do the searching more convenient. Music search, in particular, is  one of the most important search-engine that was ever invented. Because, we listen to music, non-physically, which means sometimes when we wanted to search a particular music or song, we can’t describe it with words and writing, instead we could only sing the song or hum it. It needs an advanced kind of search engine to do the search. Luckily, through a lot of evolution and development, nowadays music-search are packaged with sound recognition. One of the most popular music-search is SoundHound.

SoundHound is an audio recognition application that can listen to a music/ sound and then search the song/ music title and details (including the lyrics if there’s any). In short, it’s a music search engine that use sound-recognition and sound-search technology.  SoundHound application is available on the Apple Store, Windows Phone Store, Google Play, and Blackberry 10 platform. SoundHound enables users to identify sound or music recorded through their device’s microphone. It’s special feature is that it could recognize tracks from singing, humming, speaking, and recording from a poorly-hummed performances to professional recordings that are achieved through “Sound2Sound” technology. On the other hand, user can also do the search by speaking or typing the name of the artist, composer, song and piece of the lyrics. SoundHound has the option to register so user can keep their SoundHound history safe and sync’ed across multiple devices.

Feature Details:

Music Search --- When user listens to a music that he or she wanted to identify, user can directly record it using their device’s microphone on the app’s main page. If the device is offline at the moment, SoundHound will store it on Pending Searches, which will be able to be identified later when the device is connected online. User can also just hum or sing the song if they couldn’t get the actual recording of the song.

Music Player --- Aside from helping user to search music, SoundHound also provides music player. It could detect the device’s collection ofmusic and playlists and enables user to browse the song’s lyric on the internet if there’s an available connection to the internet.

World Music Map (partnering with Rdio) --- SoundHound’s World Music Map is a mapping feature that allows users to see, at that exact moment, what songs are being discovered and listened to by people on their street or anywhere else in the world. Amplified by Rdio, a digital music service with a library of more than 18 million songs, SoundHound’s music mapping feature enables users to explore what songs are trending in their backyard and around the world. Users can dig in and learn more about the song and artists and have the option to share with their friends and colleagues through various social sites, buy the song, view videos or link directly to the Rdio app where they can listen to the full track.

Charts (Popular Songs, New Songs, Trending Near You, Artists Born Today) --- SoundHound chart features the popular songs, new songs, songs that are popular/ trending near you (if you enable GPS and and network), and the birthdays of popular artists of the day.

Disadvantages and Advantages

Disadvantages – SoundHound application is quite “heavy” because it takes a lot of memory. Which is why intially, when user launch the app, it takes some time to load everything. Most probably because the collection of songs in the music player that needs to be loaded first when user opens the app. This also effect the sound-recognition search to become slower and sometimes crashes.

Advantages – SoundHound’s sound-recognition is what makes it stand out among the other music search engines. Because, as said before, not all the time can people search music by words and lyrics, sometimes the closest way to identify a strange song/ music can only be done by playing, singing, or humming the tune of the song, which makes sound-recognition as an important feature.

Profit

SoundHound is a product of SoundHound Inc., an audio recognition and cognition company, which develops sound-recognition and sound-search technologies that was found in 2005 by Keyvan Mohajer. With over 260 million users worldwide, SoundHound Inc. has a total revenue of $15.859 for the income statement. SoundHound actually captured three profit sources. If user finds a song after searching using SoundHound and decides to buy it, SoundHound gets a share of the profit. The other income is from applications download. There is a free version and a paid version of the app. With the free version, users can only listen to 5 songs per month, or pay for more, and upgrade to the paid version. Users can either choose to pay $0.99 for every 5 additions, or pay $4.99 at one time for access to unlimited songs. The third one is advertising. The free apps are embedded with advertisements which also contributes greatly to SoundHound’s income. SoundHound also encourages the users to record music through online recording studios, so as to contribute songs to SoundHound’s database. If a musician is talented enough, they might be able to produce themselves and generate a cash flow. Currently, there are user recordings in more than 30 languages.    

Improvement

I personally think that all features that are currently available in SoundHound app are satisfying enough. The only deficiency is that sometimes SoundHound still doesn’t have a complete database for the lyrics of the songs that has been searched. So I think SoundHound should always update their song lyrics database to satisfy their user needs. And also fix the bugs that sometimes cause the app to get crashed and closed.

In conclusion, I think SoundHound has done a great contribution for the music industry by facilitating user with an advanced search engine by using sound-recognition feature, which also makes SoundHound unique among other music searches.

References:

Wikipedia.org