The search engines of today might be able to do just word and images searches, but how many of them will be able to take a sound sample and retrieve similar tunes? An Australian computer scientist believes that the upcoming search engines in the future will be able to do just that - retrieve music on your behalf whenever you belt out a tune to your computer. She strongly holds on to her views that the next three to four years will see such a search engine appear on anyone who loves music. Currently, there are still a fair number of problems to solve, such as the wide range of music genres available as well as ‘the effect interference from things such as sound quality and environmental noise have on the ability of the program to detect notes.’

This project she’s talking about currently concentrates on a specialized music search engine that is capable of retrieving audio by singing, requiring users to log on to a specific website and singing a short snippet or lyrics straight into the computer microphone as a query submission. The computer will get to work straight away, searching the website’s database and retrieving a menu of digital files where the user can then download. Those with a lack of talent in the singing department will receive less accurate results, underlining the importance of the quality of your voice when singing a search.

In order to overcome a lack of vocal training, you can increase the accuracy of your search results by singing for a longer period than others, and the system is almost guaranteed to pull out the correct song even if the sky falls down and everyone else runs away to the nearest drugstore to purchase a pair of earplugs. After all, audio is just a wave form that goes up and down without having a bearing on how humans perceive music. Do you think the large search engines will snap up this technology, and what are some of the consequences?

Source: Primidi