find that song
About a year ago, at a party with a couple dozen Open Source and "community" people, I suggested to someone from Google that a music search where you could simply hum a few bars of a tune to find the song would be a very cool new feature. We chatted for about 10 minutes about the complexity of the problem -- which went way above my head.
Today, I read that someone's done it. Have you tried Nayio yet? I can't get it to work with Firefox (or maybe it's Firefox on Mac, not sure.) If you do get a chance to try it out, please let me kno if it works for you.
update: Ahh. It requires an ActiveX control. Well, I went over to Parallels and fired up IE, installed the ActiveX control, recorded myself humming a few bars of the theme from Sesame Street, pressed the Search button and IE crashed.
reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.
In 2003 there was a project called query-by-humming from the German Frauenhofer Institute (those also behind MP3).
There is still a German online music store using it (Java based): http://www.musicline.de/de/melodiesuche
An English article on it:
http://www.germany.info/relaunch/education/new/edu_mp3_format.html
As far as i remember there was also a mobile phone based service you could call... sponsored by a radio station... but can't find any links to it.
Posted by: mikx | December 14, 2006 11:37 AM
the idea sounds nice.. but it's not implemented correctly.. flash can access the microphone i believe.. activex and ie is just not happening.. on this machine atleast.
in the meantime i submitted the site as broken > 'browser not supported'.
Posted by: a | December 14, 2006 1:41 PM
...and IE crashed.
Nice :-)
Posted by: Cranker | December 14, 2006 2:41 PM
Interesting idea though.
What kind of database does such a service use to find the music?
Posted by: Mr Lizard | December 14, 2006 4:45 PM
www.shazam.com does this for music you're listening to at the moment, you can dial
a number and use your mobile as a mike to let the server fingerprint and recognize
the song. it's available in the uk but it's available elsewhere to.
Posted by: po baum | December 14, 2006 5:37 PM
Frauenhofer has had something like this for a few years.
I don't remember tunes anymore (intentionally, anyway). I just try to remember a couple unique words from the lyrics and then head on over to Google to figure out what the song is.
Posted by: Bernie Zimmermann | December 14, 2006 7:21 PM
... which works fine unless you mainly listen to instrumental music, of course.
Posted by: Jan! | December 15, 2006 5:13 AM
I remember coming across a reference book for "naming that tune" once. I think it only really contained classical repertoire, and maybe some pop standards. What you did was sing the first 10 notes (I think 10) and record whether the melody went up, down, or stayed the same. So a melody was represented something like this:
*UUSD DDUSD
You looked up that sequence, and it told you exactly what melody it was. I remember it being eerily accurate, and rarely did two melodies share the same scheme.
Something like this would be easily expanded to an online reference, and it could be kept up to date easily.
Wish I remembered what that book was....
Posted by: Greg | December 16, 2006 12:18 AM
Greg: "Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes" (Spencer Brown, 1975). http://www.musipedia.org/ is a site based on this method. It also has an applet to convert humming or whistling to that format, so it should solve Asa's problem too. The database is still not really comprehensive for all kinds of music unfortunately but for classical music it seems quite good.
Posted by: Justin Kerk | December 18, 2006 11:24 AM
Two interesting links (although they seem limited by the size of the database)
Musipedia :
http://www.musipedia.org/query_by_humming.0.html
Fraunhofer Institute (in German) :
http://www.musicline.de/de/melodiesuche/input
Posted by: Tulapi | December 19, 2006 2:54 AM