Yonatan Zunger (zunger) wrote,
Yonatan Zunger
zunger

How to identify music...

I really wish there were some systematic way to identify music that you can partially remember.

I've got a bit of music that's been stuck in my head, quite literally, for several years. It's symphonic, with strings leading the melody and some fairly serious horns backing them up. I'm fairly sure it's late 19th- or early 20th-century Russian; it's fairly classical in its style, but has that special bombast of Russian nationalist music. More Tchaikovsky than Rachmaninoff. It sounds like the final movement of a string concerto or (more likely) a symphony, but I'm not sure if it's the main theme or a secondary theme. It's in a minor key -- I think f minor, but I don't really trust my ability to remember an exact pitch after this many years.

Now the question is... given all of this, and the ability to hum the melody (or even transcribe it, I suppose)... how the hell can I figure out what piece it is?

(I've tried going to Amazon and listening to as many samples of pieces as I could find that might match this. Not much luck. There's a lot of music out there.)

Anyone have any ideas?
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  • 34 comments

doublefeh

November 20 2008, 19:59:15 UTC 7 years ago

Aren't you the one who works at Google?

(By which I mean: let me know what you find)

zunger

November 20 2008, 20:00:32 UTC 7 years ago

Yes. And when I first started, it was this very piece that made me think "Damn, I wish we had a 'hum a few bars and I'll search for it' function..."

kijeren

November 20 2008, 20:21:13 UTC 7 years ago

There was a thing online a while back, where you could use the space bar to "beat out" a song, and it would come back with results.

But I have no idea what it was called, or if it's still around, or if it has classical type music referenced.

ipsafictura

November 20 2008, 20:25:40 UTC 7 years ago

http://www.bored.com/songtapper/

Unfortunately, the classical music coverage is fairly bad. It did correctly identify several Beatles and Police songs that I tapped out.

firestorm717

November 20 2008, 20:25:57 UTC 7 years ago

I've always wanted a search function for that too! Say you could upload a .wav of the melody, can you use it to find an mp3 of the actual song, or would that be a ridiculously difficult audio processing problem?

(And I didn't know you worked at Google. I thought you were a professor at Stanford)

zunger

November 20 2008, 20:30:13 UTC 7 years ago

Difficult but not impossible... although I suspect that the legal problem would be far more challenging than the engineering one.

And I left academia a couple of years ago. Nowadays I work on everything from AI/NLP stuff to heavy systems infrastructure. :)

xaosenkosmos

7 years ago

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hypothermya

November 20 2008, 20:34:43 UTC 7 years ago

I'm afraid I can't help you with that one -- however, if you find a good system, be sure to let me know. I've been listening to 102.1 lately, and I keep hearing snipets of music that I love, but I have no idea who composed it or who performed it. And it's not like I can look up the lyrics or anything....

zunger

November 20 2008, 20:38:13 UTC 7 years ago

That one, I can help you with -- go to kdfc.com, and they have a list of everything they played and when.

factitiouslj

November 20 2008, 20:49:03 UTC 7 years ago

Parsons code was developed for just this sort of thing. Musipedia, which I haven't tried myself, uses it among other methods.

zunger

November 20 2008, 21:04:39 UTC 7 years ago

Gah! This is so close, and yet so far... It's really hard to input music into their system. I'm going to play with it more later to see if I can get it to work.

sylvantechie

November 20 2008, 20:52:29 UTC 7 years ago

Perhaps you heard it in a dream and it exists only in your head...? That's certainly happened to me with books and poems...

zunger

November 20 2008, 21:03:58 UTC 7 years ago

No, it's definitely real. I can't compose this well in my head. :)

savorie

November 20 2008, 21:13:26 UTC 7 years ago

I've sent your question to my friend writerspleasure, who boasts both a phenomenal memory and a huge backlog of classical music knowledge (Lizt, Chopin, etc).

In the meantime, how much of it do you think you can transcribe? Or you can play the melody or theme on your piano and post it to YouTube for even more help.

writerspleasure

November 20 2008, 21:36:27 UTC 7 years ago

http://zunger.livejournal.com/164804.html?thread=817348#t817348

zunger

7 years ago

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savorie

7 years ago

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anthologie

November 20 2008, 21:14:02 UTC 7 years ago

Phone the head of your local symphony and hum it to him or her. :)

jonquil

November 20 2008, 21:23:02 UTC 7 years ago Edited:  November 20 2008, 21:23:58 UTC

Come talk to omalley. I bet he can help. (He's got an MFA in lute; he's also done AI work in music recognition.) You can wave to me at the same time.

writerspleasure

November 20 2008, 21:36:13 UTC 7 years ago

my guess, and it's a pure guess, is that it might be the finale of an orchestration of mussgorsky's pictures at an exhibition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_at_an_Exhibition (not very good performance there, but you can check it).

whether it is or is not, you might be interested in the explosive virtuosity of horowitz in his transcription:


zunger

November 20 2008, 21:51:28 UTC 7 years ago

Alas, that isn't it... but what a wonderful performance by Horowitz!

writerspleasure

7 years ago

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zunger

7 years ago

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writerspleasure

7 years ago

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susancalvin

7 years ago

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susancalvin

7 years ago

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zunger

7 years ago

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savorie

November 20 2008, 21:53:27 UTC 7 years ago

http://www.midomi.com/ is supposedly a service where you can sing or hum a piece and get help identifying it. Not sure if it extends to classical.

Oh, check this out! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_by_humming

A list of musical information retrieval systems (probably out of date): http://mirsystems.info/index.php?id=mirsystems

skerrington

November 20 2008, 21:57:30 UTC 7 years ago

Whoa, how cool!

Hey Yony, hum it to me tonight? I doubt I'll know it, but hey, you never know. :)

jephly

November 21 2008, 02:21:55 UTC 7 years ago

You might consider a human search engine such as ChaCha or Mahalo. I don't know if either of these accept audio files as part of the question, but if they do, that might get a fair number of ears and brains on the problem for little cost/time/effort on your part.

gmcnaughton

November 21 2008, 07:10:41 UTC 7 years ago

I have no useful suggestions. However, you could flesh out the music by making an MTurk task that plays a midi/wav of the snippet you remember, then asking users to select what note should come next. Take the best results for the first note(s), automatically rebuild the midi, and repeat.

zorbathut

November 21 2008, 08:20:53 UTC 7 years ago

I was playing around with some prototype code for doing stuff like that at Google, but never got too far. Pity, really, it was kind of fun.

kf6gpe

November 21 2008, 14:24:31 UTC 7 years ago

Query by humming (QBH) has been hit and miss for me --- Midomi (as mentioned by a fellow friend previously) on the iPhone works amazingly well for Meg, but is an utter disaster for me (perhaps due to the fact that I can't carry a tune, even with a bucket...)

There are a couple ACM papers on it from a few years ago, IIRC --- they pointed to other vendors.


zunger

November 21 2008, 17:53:59 UTC 7 years ago

Yeah... in the past day I've tried a bunch of QbH engines, and have had pretty bad luck. There's definitely a speech-recognition--like problem here; I can whistle something which sounds tonally fine to a human ear, but which picks up all sorts of bogus stray notes when a computer tries to convert it.