Sunday, June 05, 2005

Name My Tune

From today's newspaper, a website that allows people to A) find the name of a tune that they can hum but can't recall the artist or title, and B) have fun listening to other people humming or singing bits of songs and identifying what the piece is. For the first part, simply hum or sing 10 seconds of the song into your computer's microphone (a requirement), and the website sends the clip to experts as determined by your guess of genre and era. The genres include Alternative, Blues, Classical, Country, Dance, Electronic, Folk, Hip Hop/Rap, Inspirational, Jazz, Latin, New Age, Pop, R&B/Soul, Rock, Soundtrack, Vocal, World, and Any. The eras are by decades, from pre-1960's to the 2000s, with a category for the last 12 months. I haven't tried this feature yet.

Listening to 17 "classical" songs on the second part, I heard "Hey Jude" sung to the lyrics "hap hap, hap hap hap hap;" something bizarre sung with heavy reverb, a blank recording (which I naturally identified as 4'33"), I think a recording from a radio about 20 feet away from the computer, a fair rendition of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony ("this is the melody, to Schubert's unfinished symphony..."), something played pretty nicely on the clarinet, I think some Asian folk song, and some varying qualities of singing, humming, and whistling. Most of them seem to be not Classical, but rather classic Rock, pop, or World music. This isn't too surprising, as the website refers to everything as "songs" and asks for the recording artist rather than a composer. Thus it is biased towards pop culture.

I sense party games, possibly involving drinking, using this website.

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