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

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

November 20 2008, 22:06:41 UTC 7 years ago

For finding the song name/etc, it's called Shazam, and it works incredibly well. There's a free iPhone app version, which made me really happy. I used to work at a place that made extensive use of the core technology, and had access to a very large match database. When I left that company, no more lookups, sigh.

For finding the MP3... not so much. You can easily run it through youtube, but I dont' know that anyone has written the youtube audio -> MP3 extractor yet (it would be fairly trivial).