Sing and search — Midomi is a new music search engine that uses voice recognition to help users find the name of millions of music tracks.Have you ever found yourself humming the tune of a song that you don’t know or can’t remember?
Now the answer to your frustration is just a click and a hum away.
Midomi, launched in late January, is a new music search site that can identify songs in as little as 10 seconds.
Users simply sing, hum or whistle a part of the tune they are looking for and Midomi will display all the relevant search results – either commercially recorded tracks or versions of the songs recorded by other users.
Don’t worry if you’re microphone shy – Midomi also accepts text-based lyric, title and artist searches.
So how does the voice recognition behind Midomi work?
The underlying speech and sound recognition technology, dubbed Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System or MARS, differs from similar technologies because it assess a variety of factors when processing samples such as pitch, tempo variation, speech content and the location of pauses.
To put Midomi to the test, etalk searched Lips of an Angel, the number one single in Australia this week on the Aria chart.
As expected, the commercially recorded track by rock group Hinder was number one and available for legal digital purchase.
Then followed a hoard of user recorded versions ranging from rather impressive to downright dreadful.
It seems as though a generation of wannabe American – and Australian – Idols have swamped Midomi with renditions of their favourite tunes.
Members can access a page called My Studio and record as many home-brew songs as desired, which can then be rated by fellow users.
More than 12,000 member recordings have already been uploaded to the Midomi servers.
The site generates its income through the seamless placement of content-specific advertisements.
Log on to Midomi at www.midomi.com and start making some noise.
