A different performance interrupted by a ringtone (looks like from six months ago or so). Great response by the performer.

I have wanted, at various times, exactly what GroupMe provides: free group texting.

Shazam is this ridiculously cool service where you hold your phone up, record maybe 10 seconds of whatever song is playing, and the service identifies the song for you with uncanny accuracy, even in rooms with lots of background noise. Slate has a piece on how it fingerprints songs to work its magic:

OK, but how does Shazam make these fingerprints? As Avery Wang, Shazam’s chief scientist and one of its co-founders, explained to Scientific American in 2003, the company’s approach was long considered computationally impractical—there was thought to be too much information in a song to compile a simple signature. But as he wrestled with the problem, Wang had a brilliant idea: What if he ignored nearly everything in a song and focused instead on just a few relatively “intense” moments? Thus Shazam creates a spectrogram for each song in its database—a graph that plots three dimensions of music: frequency vs. amplitude vs. time. The algorithm then picks out just those points that represent the peaks of the graph—notes that contain “higher energy content” than all the other notes around it, as Wang explained in an academic paper he published to describe how Shazam works (PDF). In practice, this seems to work out to about three data points per second per song.