Sing to your computer for search

AUSSIE BOFFINS are close to working out a way of getting a computer to find music on the interweb by singing a few bars of a tune into a microphone.

Dr Sandra Uitdenbogerd, a researcher at Melbourne's RMIT University, says it is useless to search for a song when you don't know the title or think, for example, that Whitney Houston is singing "Shaving off my muff for you."

Finding classical music is even worse. It is all Dur Dur Dur Dar and when the Fat Lady does actually belt out a few words they are remarkably similar to all other Operas, despite what your Grannie might say.

Uitdenbogerd, who holds a PhD in Computer Science and specialises in music information-retrieval technology, said she had been working for ten years on a project to get a singing based search.

She said that the technology is about four years away from the desktop.

Working prototypes match voice signals with more advanced audio files like MP3s. Next it compares the song note from a database of information that's been extracted from lots of audio files that are in a collection that you're searching.

Uitdenbogerd has got the search gizmo down pat, what is slowing her down is indexing all the music in the world.

Of course it does not work if you are tone deaf.

More here. µ