[y1zhou]

> On the flipside, this "fingerprint" approach is also what makes Shazam work poorly if you just sing into it. You're likely to generate different hashes than the original song, even if you are a very good singer! This is why newer, machine-learning-based systems are built to handle humming and singing, by matching on melody rather than exact frequencies.

So this is why singing/whistling a song to my phone never worked! I've always imagined the tech as some sort of wave pattern matching but the DFT is obviously more efficient for many scenarios. Cool article!