Tooly Tools

I just discovered something super-awesome, it's called Musipedia and it is not only a music encyclopedia, but soooo much more.

Have you ever had a melody to a song stuck in your head, but couldn't figure out what song or who sang it? I have, it pretty much happens ALL the time. A lot of the time it's unpleasant, you feel like an idiot or a victim of advertising and corporate America... I once had Flo Rida's "Low" stuck in my head for a month, it was awful... but that's story for another time...

Anyway, have you ever wondered if there was a way to find out just what the name or artist of that song was? Well, today is your lucky day because Musipedia has a service, or tool, or widget, or twidget (wait, would that be a twitter widget?) Anyway...there are five different ways you can find out your song, ranging from tools for the people who actually know musical theory and stuff....to those who like to just bang it out on a keyboard like me!

Musipedia uses Melodyhound for this service, and on it you can use a digital keyboard to play the melody, sing or whistle it into your computer, use the melodic contour (parsons code) (I still don't understand what this is), or tap the rhythm into your computer.

Before writing about it, I decided to check out Melodyhound for myself. My experience was not as amazing as I thought it would be. First I tried the rhythm search, but I soon found out I had no rhythm! Not one of the tunes I was tapping into the keyboard was coming up as a result! I would tap the rhythm to "Smoke on the Water" and the computer would think I was tapping out some Mozart song! I wouldn't dare try the piano keyboard, contour, or draw note search, since I know nothing about music theory, but I did try humming the tune into my laptop's microphone (you can also whistle, but I cannot). That turned out even worse than the tapping! I tried to hum one of my favorite songs by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps" (the tune was simple enough), but it turned out that my humming also sounded like a number of classical songs and Bruce Springstein?!

Maybe I should just stick to listening to music, and leave the theory to the professionals...
It would be cool to have an application for people like me who don't know anything about making music, but would like to be able to hum the tune of a song that has been stuck in their head for weeks and find out the title/artist. I am sure it is only a matter of time until this sort of thing is possible.

Even though it didn't work for me I think this application would work for musicians and composers and could be very useful for their sort of work; it's like the google of melody searches!

Is this as useful a tool as easybib, maybe not (depending on who you are). But you have to admit that it is pretty interesting, and if you know a lot about music theory then this just may be the tool for you!