Re: Defeating Music Identification Apps - Adding Gaussian Noise?

A belated thank you to all those you responded to my post!



Paul Davis <[email protected]> writes:
>
> Did you see Benn Jordan's video on this (or an adjacent)
> topic?
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DxMYm2d9bmEA

I did, which is where I got the idea.

On a related note, that video was taken down recently.



"Jeanette C." <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> it would be easy enough to do in Csound. At the very
> least, I could send you a file to create as much Gaussian
> noise as you want.  Specifically mixing it with audio in
> mp3 or the usual sndfile-supported formats is also easy
> enough.

Yes, I was thinking of this.  I have not coded with Csound for 10 years or more, but I could get back into it.


Fons Adriaensen <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> For your quiz I assume you want to test if your students
> can identify a particular period or style rather than the
> actual title of the piece.
> 
> The way to do this is to force them to motivate their
> final choice.  Instead of having just one multiple choice
> between a number of periods or styles, also have them
> identify features:
> 
> - complexity, 
> - type of harmony, 
> - orchestration,
> - temporal structure, 
> - ....
> 
> providing a MC item for each of these.

Actually, I do this, asking the students to identify style elements as well.

However, I teach Community College and I have a wide range of students, some who could handle such a question, but many are quite frankly barely ready for college.  For many students, I have to accept any vague answer that is close, or I would have to fail a good 70% of the class.



Chris Caudle <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> On Wednesday, April 8, 2026 10:28:40 PM Central Daylight Time Ivan K wrote:
> >
> > Also I have read how one can add a bit of gaussian noise
> > to a sound file, and while to the human ear, the music
> > sounds identical, adding this noise can interfere with
> > or prevent these identification apps from identifying
> > the music.
> 
> An easy way to think about this is consider what would
> happen if you played music on a device with slightly worse
> signal-to-noise ratio, which is what additive Gaussian
> noise would be, just a slight increase
> in white noise.

This is an online class.  The students take the quizzes in a browser and play the examples on whatever speaks and/or headphones they have at home.

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One thing that I have learned is that Shazam (the most popular phone app that recognizes and names pieces of music) does so by consulting a library of commercially available audio, as Shazam does not just list the name/composer of a piece of music, but displays the CD image as well.

And so, if the recording has not been commercially released, that is, I get the recording from an ensemble that posts their performances on YouTube, Shazam fails to recognize such recordings, even with incredibly famous pieces like symphonies by Beethoven or Mahler symphonies).


I experimented with compressing the audio these files, but found that Shazam could still recognize them.


Recently, I just used ffmpeg to mix some some gaussian noise with these audio files, but Shazam was able to still identify the piece of music.

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Thank you for your feedback.