IF YOU鈥橵E ever had a song in your head but don鈥檛 know what it is, you鈥檒l soon
be able to get the answer just by whistling to your PC. Bj酶rn Olstad, research
and development chief at Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) in Oslo, Norway, says
their new search software can find a tune and name it with as few as five notes
to go on. Users can sing, whistle or play a few notes on a musical instrument
into their PC鈥檚 microphone. If that stretches your musical talent too far,
鈥渟imply tapping a rhythm can be enough to locate the right file鈥�, says
Olstad.
The key to the software is its ability to digitise your ditty and then
extract a sequence of pitch and timing data that can be usefully compared with
actual musical pieces. The idea is that after you鈥檝e entered your tune, the
search engine scours a database of tunes, looking for matching pitch and timing
information. 鈥淭iming is a non-precise parameter. Even a pianist cannot play a
piece the same way twice. And the pitch of different singers can vary widely,鈥�
says Olstad. 鈥淥ur algorithm has been designed to accommodate this fuzziness.鈥�
But there鈥檚 another problem. At the moment there aren鈥檛 any databases of
relevant musical information. So FAST, which runs the search engine at
www.alltheweb.com, is negotiating with other dotcoms who might want to set up
commercial music databases to catalogue tracks they have for sale.
Olstad sees great potential for the program鈥攂ut not just for tracing
half-forgotten tunes. He predicts that scholars will use it to compare
compositions, and lawyers to settle copyright battles.
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