In its struggle to somehow stay relevant in the online world, Microsoft is going nerd:

When Microsoft hired Qi Lu to run its online business last week, the company trumpted the fact that Lu holds 20 patents.

Patents are far from rare at Microsoft—many developers and researchers hold them—but the online business has typically been led by people with a business or marketing background. That hasn't been working out too well, so they're putting a geek in charge.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer's Microsoft reporter, Joe Tartakoff, did a little digging on Tuesday to uncover exactly what kinds of patents Lu holds. Most interesting to me, one of them relates to music.
Specifically, it describes a PC application that could take a snippet of a song or audio file, break it down into component parts, analyze them, and then recommend similar songs.

It sounds superficially similar to what Shazam does, but the method is very different and more complicated. From what I can tell, Shazam simply takes a sound sample and matches it against a database with millions of audio files. Getting a fast result requires some fast data crunching, but there's not much deep analysis going on there.
Lu's patent (shared with two other engineers) proposed breaking the song all the way down to very small components like measures and individual notes, analyzing those components to find patterns—for example, a repeated sequence of notes might be the refrain or chorus—and then analyzing the relationships among those parts.

For instance, a pop song is typically constructed of several repeated verses and choruses, with a bridge somewhere in the middle. This is how the application would be able to identify and recommend songs that are similar to the song being played.

Instead of Shazam, the end result might have been more like Apple's recently introduced Genius feature, which builds playlists of songs based on the song you're currently playing.

Via Cnet