Neat idea, a search engine that can find music when you hum it. It’s called Midomi.
Cnet reports:
Launching in beta mode on Friday (this past week), Midomi allows people to search for a song by singing, humming or whistling a bit of the tune. The site then offers search results that include commercially recorded tracks or versions of the song recorded by others who have used the site. The technology also lets people listen to the exact section of each of the results that matched their voice sample.
(thanks, Scot)
Sounds good – there is/was something similar in the UK (and probably everywhere else too) called Shazam which would let you dial 2580 (straight down the middle of the keypad) on your mobile, and hold the mobile up to a loudspeaker in a pub/club/wherever. Shazam would then text you the name of the song. I think you could buy the song through the Shazam website at a later point in time.
A very useful music search engine but the more interesting aspect is not the quality of the music on the site but the voice search technology.
All the big players have a large interest in the future of voice search as it will power applications other than the web in the future.
The link below outlines some of the big players in the market.
http://www.andyredfern.co.uk/2007/01/29/my-top-six-voice-search-providers/
Shazam does not work like Midomi. I know on the surface they appear to be similar technologies, but Shazam is a digital music fingerprinting service, one that is extremely robust to noise. It works great is a crowded bar, over your cell phone, but it can only identify the exact song you are hearing. That means that if you are hearing the studio version of a song, it will not be able to match/find the live version, even though it is the same song, same singers, and same instruments. It has to be the exact same song.
Midomi, on the other hand, works by doing an actual content analysis of the notes and beats, and matches the semantics of the music, rather than fingerprints the raw audio.
However, this technology is by no means new. Systems like this have been around since as early as 1993. If you really want more information on music search, check out Paul Lamere’s blog:
blogs.sun.com/plamere
or look at the work being done by the ISMIR community:
http://www.ismir.net
Frauenhofer (the mp3 people) has had this available for years now. They have a demo that you can see in the Tokyo science museum (and certainly other locations). It’s a simple windows app.
the comments that i have is do you have a survey where i can do and get paid for the same thing that i will be doing.and just to let you know that i am a very motivated person and also is in the line of looking for some kind of new work to do so if you do have some kind of work that i can get off into. can you please contact me as soon as posible or when you do get some work in or is there a waiting list.so i am also giving you a head up about your program and again my name is rechalle barksdale 612-521-9302 so thank you for this one.
Shazam does not work like Midomi. I know on the surface they appear to be similar technologies, but Shazam is a digital music fingerprinting service, one that is extremely robust to noise. It works great is a crowded bar, over your cell phone, but it can only identify the exact song you are hearing. That means that if you are hearing the studio version of a song, it will not be able to match/find the live version, even though it is the same song, same singers, and same instruments. It has to be the exact same song
There is also the collaborative approach like on WatZatSong : http://www.watzatsong.com
Much more efficient to me!