The iPhone app midomi has it the internet
Midomi is a music search engine with a difference - a singing search engine, if you like. It lets you search online for songs and other music in any of 6 languages, free. Just sing, hum, whistle, play etc the tune into your computer microphone or headset (or, in future, pick it out on an on-screen piano keyboard). And it actually works! What's more, it's a classic Web 2.0service with user generated content and social networking for singers and music fans. Their searchable database of music (which their music recognition search engine uses for matching voice search queries) is 100% user-generated - it's been built up entirely by their registered members recording and submitting the music of their choice. And registered users can rate and comment on other members' renditions, share recordings they like, add recordings to their playlists etc, too. It also serves as a digital music store, if you want to buy the music that you've found through your search.
So to put a name to that tune that's been stuck in your head buzzing round and round, to figure out the unknown song or earworm bugging you which you can't get out of your mind, why not try midomi. Even if you can't remember the whole song, you can simply feed it the few notes you can remember. It's able to identify a song from a fragment of the melody, from just a few bars or lines - although the longer the sequence that you can give it, the more accurate its recognition is likely to be.
You can click to play items in the search results list to make sure you find the right song, and it'll play just the part which their software thinks matches what you sung rather than the whole song. You can hear sample extracts of original commercial recordings of the music discovered through your search - and even buy and download digital tracks legally for US $0.99 via a program you have to Download from the site. They've licensed 2.5 million songs for sale.
I mentioned Sandra Uitdenbogerd's music information retrieval research in my post about Yahoo! Audio Search results now including audio samples as did others. A commercial version of that system is still a few years away; but midomi is already here, and (mostly) working, taking a much simpler yet very workable approach: why try to analyse the "signatures" of polyphonic audio with multiple lines, multiple instruments or sound sources and possibly complex harmonies, when you can make use of monophonic renditions of single melodies?
Midomi seem to be on an upward growth curve too. Their CEO Keyvan Mohajer gave A Consuming Experience the following statistics:
- Total number of recordings as of Aug 2007: well over 100,000 (when they launched they started with 12,000 songs)
- Number of new songs added per day: between 1000 and 3000
- Unique visitors in August 2007: close to 2 million per month
- Expected unique visitors in September 2007: over 3 million per month.
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