Hum a tune search

BEING able to hum a melody into a computer should see an end to people being frustrated because they can’t remember the words, a boffin has discovered. But RMIT’s Sandra Uitdenbogerd, who has spent the last ten years developing advanced music-recognising technology, says the tone-deaf will still have to struggle to learn the words.

The computer science expert has developed technology that recognises melody and searches the internet to track down information about the song.

“Obviously, there are songs that people will know the lyrics to and Googling the words will generate fast and accurate results,” Dr Uitdenbogerd said. “However there are categories of music that cannot be searched using text as a method of retrieval.”

She said that being able to track down the title of a classical music composition was incredibly hard, and many composers may have struggled to work out if a piece of music had been written already.

“The idea of music searches by singing was born out of my frustration of not knowing whether I had stolen someone else’s melody when writing music inspirationally.”

All users need were a microphone, an internet connection and the software to begin the search for any tune they have stuck in their head.

“The singing is stored in the computer as a wave form and then must be converted into note information before it can be matched against the music,” Dr Uitdenbogerd said. “The converted fragment of recorded singing is compared with the note information extracted from the audio files in the online music collection that’s being searched.”

Currently, the technology can only search for simple MIDI files, but Dr Uitdenbogerd said MP3 compatible software would be her next goal.