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INTERVIEW: Dr Avery Wang, Principal Research Scientist at Apple and Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Shazam
The story of Shazam is a remarkable one.
In 1999, Chris Barton dreamed of a seemingly impossible solution to ambient music recognition and gathered together a team to achieve it, including his friend Dhiraj Mukherjee, classmate Philip Inghelbrecht, and engineer Avery Wang. And even after 20 years post-launch, Shazam currently has over 200 million monthly active users and was acquired by Apple in 2018.
In this interview, Avery talks me through the invention process, going all the way back to how, as a child, he fell in love with science and maths and how his parents encouraged him to experiment, up to how he managed to invent the Shazam algorithm which every expert said was impossible.
Avery rarely does interviews so I am over the moon to share this with you. Everyone who knows him refers to him as a genius and it’s easy to see why — he holds over 150 US and international patents, has a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master’s in Mathematics, and a Master’s and PhD in Electrical Engineering, all from Stanford.
Here’s his story…
Newnham: Can you tell me about your childhood? And what made you fall in love with maths and science?
