Could you hum it for me

January 22, 2003 8:08 AM

Thanks Again, Frauhofer!"Software developed by Germany's Fraunhofer Institut, the creators of the MP3 ... called "Query by Humming," -- a type of melody recognition software program that identifies a song by title and composer based on a person humming a few bars into a microphone." Sure, it'll put quaint sites like this out of business, but think of the fun you'll have walking by your co-workers cubicle only to hear them furtively humming into their PC so that it can search for that pesky tune they can't get out of their head. (This technology sounds familiar, so advanced apologies for a double post. I did a search, really.)
posted by chandy72 (4 comments total)

QBH has been around for a while in research-land but the Fraunhofer implementation (based on the MPEG7 spec) is a good first engineering step. Still not sure of its utility, especially since it needs to operate on a score-level database, which isn't easy to come by (badly transcribed .mids of Britney Spears doesn't count.)
posted by neustile at 8:19 AM on January 22, 2003

You beat me to it, chandy72! I just wrote about this myself, but I'll spare you the self-link (just did that in another thread).

What excites me about this is that they may be generating the metadata automatically, which will be a big step toward automated transcription. There's more from Fraunhofer here.
posted by Songdog at 10:41 AM on January 22, 2003

neustile, there are some good databases out there, as well as printed reference works. They've been discussed here before (some wonderful links in there).
posted by Songdog at 11:06 AM on January 22, 2003

I just hope they don't try to patent the hell out of this stuff
posted by delmoi at 2:39 PM on January 22, 2003