Humming to Search For Songs

A new technology is in the works that will allow us to search for music and downloads simply by humming the tune. It is being developed by an Australian scientist, Dr. Sandra Uitdenbogerd, is the Melbourne researcher and mastermind behind this. Her idea is simple, suggesting that finding a song can be tricky if you don't know its title, or perhaps if it has common lyrics.

"If you know the words then you're far better off just typing some lyrics into Google and that will work brilliantly, but for certain types of music, that's not really an option," she says.

The good doctor has a PhD in Computer Science and specializes in music information-retrieval technology. The word is, she's been working on this particular project for about ten years. Within another three or four years, the technology could actually be ready for commercial use. Naturally, she wants to see it being utilized in our most popular, biggest card-holders of music applications and download programs (i.e. iTunes).

To use it, all you'll need is a microphone and an internet connection. According to the explanations, I'm led to believe that singing in key would be a plus. It's even been said that the less accurate the singing, the harder it'll be to find a match. So on that note (no pun intended), it can also be assumed that you may have to try a time or two to get it right, probably just like you already have to do with many voice recognition applications.

"What you sing into the computer gets stored as a wave form and in order to do matching against the music we have convert that into note information," she said.

After this step, you'll receive a list of your matching results, at which point you can select which song to download.

The concept is good, and I've found myself in such a pickle before. I can't say if it'll be any more convenient in the long run, but it seems appreciated for those tricky situations nonetheless. We already know that it'll require a little patience to work with, but if you're willing to sing to a computer to find and download it, I guess it's all worth it.

1 Comment

it already exists