Klarinet Archive - Posting 000203.txt from 2002/12

From: Nick Simicich <njs@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] I can name that tune in nine notes...
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 10:52:41 -0500

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On TV yesterday, there was a short article about humming. They
demonstrated someone humming into a computer to try to figure out what song
they were humming. The computer then searched a database and dug out the
tune. I did a web search and found the paper.

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Info/Faculty/bsmith/query-by-humming.html

The paper is about a scheme for being able to figure out what a song is on
the basis of being able to listen to someone hum a snatch of the song.

My thought was. "Some people hum really badly. How well could they do this?"

They came up with a scheme to counteract this...

It is a really cool idea----You do not have to hum well, they use a three
letter alphabet - same as previous note, up from previous note, or down.

> For example, the introductory theme Beethoven's 5th Symphony would be
>converted into the sequence: - S S D U S S D (the first note is ignored as
>it has no previous pitch).

Anyway, I can imagine "Google song search".

Great thing for a bar.

The only issue is that they were using a 183 song database. In order to be
"real" this would have to contain thousands of songs. They would probably
also have to figure out a way to plug a CD or an MP3 into the analyzer and
push out a representation rather than just using midi files. This was done
in the day of the P-90. I suspect that there would be a lot more cheap
computing power available today :-). They also talked about MP4 - which
they described as a "postscript for sound" - instead of a representation of
the waveform, it was instructions on how to reconstruct the waveform, and
supposedly it is 1% the size of an MP3 (http://sound.media.mit.edu/mpeg4/)
and maybe there would be a way to use information kept there for this sort
of search.

Anyway, they found that nine notes were generally enough to determine which
song it was.

--
If you doubt that magnet therapy works, I put to you this observation: When
refrigerators were first invented, in the 1940s, they were rather
unreliable, but then they became significantly more reliable. The basic
design of the refrigerator did not change, and we all know that quality was
important back then, so I doubt that newer refrigerators are made better.
Refrigerators have become more reliable because of the rise of the
refrigerator magnet.
Nick Simicich - njs@-----.com

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