IF YOU’VE ever had a song in your head but don’t know what it is, you’ll soon
be able to get the answer just by whistling to your PC. Bjørn Olstad, research
and development chief at Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) in Oslo, Norway, says
their new search software can find a tune and name it with as few as five notes
to go on. Users can sing, whistle or play a few notes on a musical instrument
into their PC’s microphone. If that stretches your musical talent too far,
“simply tapping a rhythm can be enough to locate the right file”, says
Olstad.
The key to the software is its ability to digitise your ditty and then
extract a sequence of pitch and timing data that can be usefully compared with
actual musical pieces. The idea is that after you’ve entered your tune, the
search engine scours a database of tunes, looking for matching pitch and timing
information. “Timing is a non-precise parameter. Even a pianist cannot play a
piece the same way twice. And the pitch of different singers can vary widely,”
says Olstad. “Our algorithm has been designed to accommodate this fuzziness.”
But there’s another problem. At the moment there aren’t any databases of
relevant musical information. So FAST, which runs the search engine at
www.alltheweb.com, is negotiating with other dotcoms who might want to set up
commercial music databases to catalogue tracks they have for sale.
Olstad sees great potential for the program—but not just for tracing
half-forgotten tunes. He predicts that scholars will use it to compare
compositions, and lawyers to settle copyright battles.
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