Sing, hum or whistle a song and find the title

The search for the title of that certain catchy tune might come to an end. A new search engine from California is named Midomi and is specialized on music. It is not only possible to search for an author, title or text, but also for a melody hummed or sung by the user himself. Among other things, the song will be recognized by means of tempo, tone pitch and sound of words. If the singer is not very talented, the song reportedly will still be found.

Next to a search engine, Midomi additionally intends to be a community: Songs by other users can be listened to, users can exchange their thoughts about music and find people with a similar taste. The target group of the service seems to be rather hobby singers as there is the possibility to rate the singing quality of users. They appear in a sort of high score list. The goal of the developers is: “to build the most comprehensive database of searchable music”. (vck)