Songtapper - Tap spacebar to tune: It knows song | Hacker News Reader

Songtapper - Tap spacebar to tune: It knows song

songtapper.com

14 pointsedw51918 comments

Here is a paper describing how it works: http://cgi.sfu.ca/~gpeters/tapper/AAAI054PetersG.pdf .

Basically, they start with the durations between each note, normalize for differences in tempo, and then create a string that for each note indicates whether the duration goes up, down, or stays the same between each note. Then find the edit distance between that string, and the strings in the database for each song.

You might have to read that a dozen or so times to make any sense of it, but it beats reading the paper if you have work to get done.

If you want to look into it further, http://cgi.sfu.ca/~gpeters/tapper/tapper.cgi .

This simply can't work for anything other than very simple tunes. Rhythm is less than half of the picture in any modern piece of music, and there are a few basic patterns that repeat across hundreds or thousands of songs.

Nice idea. Shame it doesn't work. Something where users could sing or hum the tune could actually work though. A true 'musical' search engine. I had this idea years ago but I think the implementation would be really hard.

Sintresting.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were a program that could turn your hums and tappings into musical instruments? Everyone could be a musical maestro!

I've heard this idea from multiple places, so I expect it's one of those ideas that is easy to think of but difficult to implement. A similar idea was expressed in the plot of The Music Man, where children are taught to play instruments by imagining that they are whistling.

I wouldn't be surprised if the main implementation problem is that many people are naturally off-key when whistling or humming, and those on-key know the notes well enough that it is more efficient to simply enter music via a piano-like keyboard.

Couldn't get Smoke on the Water? Psh...

I tried the start of Highway To Hell - very recognisable - and it gave me some Whitney Houston options or something.

Is this thing just random?

Terrible.

Didn't get Yes, ACDC or Stevie Wonder.

It got "Hey Jude". At least, that was the 2nd of the possibilities it mentioned.

I think that's kind of amazing.

Needs more Bowie! Didn't get "Modern Love"

Got "Down Town" by Emma Bunton on the first try. Didn't get "Exit music for a film", by Radiohead.

I tried three diff songs, it failed on all of them. It even failed on "Happy Birthday..."

It got Happy Birthday and the Star Spangled Banner.

Couldn't get InaGaddaDaVida.

Aha, it's the Eliza trick: if you can look smart for the first fifteen seconds, many people will conclude that you're smart.

One wonders what percentage of people pick one of those two songs to try first. (I'm guessing that several other popular choices, like, say, "America, the Beautiful" and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", are also pretty easy for the program to pick out.)

Apparently not "Row, row, row your boat" though.

Saw this years back, tried it again just now to see if they got it to work by now.

It thought the VU's "Sunday Morning" was Guardiani Del Destino's "Rhapsody" (and their "Rock & Roll" was Sonata Arctica's "Weballergy"), the head of Coltrane's "Giant Steps" was Shakira's "Whenever Wherevr", CSN's "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" was "A New York Fairytale", Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" was "If Ever I Would Leave You", The Clash's "Atom Tan" was Mental as Anything's "Live it Up", and The Police's "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" was Toquinho's "Aquarela". FAIL.

Simply terrible.

It couldn't even pick out the highly recognizable beat of that old favourite, Axel F!

Heh, Axel F was the second song I tried, and it recognized it.

Did you add the song after tapping it?

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