Girls, Gambling, And Games Key To 3G Success >>
<< Bioterror Early Warning Internet System
 tdicon 


(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick

Fri, Dec 14th 2001 3:12pm





I Can Name That Tune In...

from the audio-fingerprinting dept

I've been hearing about companies working on technologies like this for a while, but I have no idea how well (if at all) any of them work. Philips is now getting ready to release their audio fingerprinting technology that will allow you to call up a phone number on your cell phone, let the phone listen to any song, and within a few seconds, the phone will tell you what the song is (including artist and album). They claim they have a database of almost every song ever recorded (though, I'm not sure I would believe that). They also say that it works on any 3 seconds from any of those songs. I'd certainly be interested in trying it out. On first glance, it doesn't seem particularly useful beyond the "hey, what's this song called?" random questions that people sometimes ask. However, Philips and others think it can be used to prevent illegal file trading, by automatically catching "blocked songs" even if the names are changed.

4 Comments | Leave a Comment..


If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...
 


 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1.  

    What about..

    identicon
    Duffman, Dec 14th, 2001 @ 8:20pm

    Remixes? And songs that are just similar, like two songs that might have the same opening (5 second) bass line? Sounds like another crazy claim to me. Probably does work well - on all two dozen songs they tested it on.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    cool. BUT...

    identicon
    mhh5, Dec 17th, 2001 @ 12:29am

    What I really want is hum-recognition technology. So I can hum a tune that I can't remember the name of and have some insanely-great (ahem) "voice recognition" search a music database and tell me what the song I'm humming.... I think it's almost possible to do--especially if the search algorithm knew what the most 'popular/catchy' tunes that people forget are....

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: cool. BUT...

    identicon
    hummer, Dec 17th, 2001 @ 1:23am

    This already exists. I can't remember the URL but there is a site in New Zealand or Australia that takes a recording of you humming a classical tune and attempts to identify it. I think there is a folk version as well. It is not hard to do given the appropriate database of themes!

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    Re: cool. BUT...

    identicon
    mhh5, Dec 17th, 2001 @ 2:50am

    google remembers for us:
    hum that tune....

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Save me a cookie
  • Note: A CRLF will be replaced by a break tag (<br>), all other allowable HTML will remain intact
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>

Girls, Gambling, And Games Key To 3G Success >>
<< Bioterror Early Warning Internet System
 tdicon 

A word from our Sponsors...
Follow Techdirt
Flattr rss rss
Essential Reading

Hot Topics

New To Techdirt?

Explore some core concepts:

read all »

A word from our Sponsors...

Close

Email This