I Can Name That Tune In...

from the audio-fingerprinting dept

I've been hearing about companies working on technologies like this for a while, but I have no idea how well (if at all) any of them work. Philips is now getting ready to release their audio fingerprinting technology that will allow you to call up a phone number on your cell phone, let the phone listen to any song, and within a few seconds, the phone will tell you what the song is (including artist and album). They claim they have a database of almost every song ever recorded (though, I'm not sure I would believe that). They also say that it works on any 3 seconds from any of those songs. I'd certainly be interested in trying it out. On first glance, it doesn't seem particularly useful beyond the "hey, what's this song called?" random questions that people sometimes ask. However, Philips and others think it can be used to prevent illegal file trading, by automatically catching "blocked songs" even if the names are changed.
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  1. identicon
    Duffman, 14 Dec 2001 @ 8:20pm

    What about..

    Remixes? And songs that are just similar, like two songs that might have the same opening (5 second) bass line? Sounds like another crazy claim to me. Probably does work well - on all two dozen songs they tested it on.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    mhh5, 17 Dec 2001 @ 12:29am

    cool. BUT...

    What I really want is hum-recognition technology. So I can hum a tune that I can't remember the name of and have some insanely-great (ahem) "voice recognition" search a music database and tell me what the song I'm humming.... I think it's almost possible to do--especially if the search algorithm knew what the most 'popular/catchy' tunes that people forget are....

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    hummer, 17 Dec 2001 @ 1:23am

    Re: cool. BUT...

    This already exists. I can't remember the URL but there is a site in New Zealand or Australia that takes a recording of you humming a classical tune and attempts to identify it. I think there is a folk version as well. It is not hard to do given the appropriate database of themes!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    mhh5, 17 Dec 2001 @ 2:50am

    Re: cool. BUT...

    google remembers for us:
    hum that tune....

    link to this | view in thread ]


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