Website Lets Users Search For Unknown Tunes That Get Stuck In Their Head
Posted February 1, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s probably happened to you. You get a song stuck in your head and you can’t quite remember the tune, the artist or even the melody.
It used to be enough to drive you crazy, but once again the Internet has come to the rescue.
A new website allows users to hum, sing or even whistle a tune into their computer’s microphone and then search for a similar melody that matches that music.
Midomi.com was launched earlier this week and not only lets you search for songs, but show off your own vocal talents as well. It’s a twist on the American Idol craze, because you can post a version of anything you do record for others to hear, rate and even download.
And you also buy a CD in case you happen to find that missing song done by a professional recording artist.
But what if your song isn’t there? The site allows you to enter it in a database so that if other users find it, they can finally I.D. it for you.
The site uses a unique voice activated search technology called MARS (short for Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System), that analyzes the sounds you enter and matches them against a database.
The program is able to differentiate between whistling, singing and humming and is supposed to be able to compensate for any typos or errors you make while using its search functions.
“We have created one of the most entertaining search engines on the web,” boasts Keyvan Mohajer of Melodis Corporation. “Users of midomi.com will be able to both search our extensive database as well as help grow it; when a user tags (sings and saves) their favorite songs, the submissions immediately become part of the searchable MARS universe.”
It may not be the best way to get discovered, but it’s definitely one way to get your voice heard – if only by a computer.
To explore this strange new site, click here.
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