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Yahoo! Launches Audio Search Beta
guaigean writes "Internet News is running a story on a new Yahoo! service titled Yahoo! Audio Search and it is currently in beta. The tool allows the searching of audio files and Yahoo! claims to have 50 million music, voice, and other files cataloged in the search. It searches across multiple mainstream music sites, as well as plenty of independent pages. Now if only it was tied in with some sort of lyric search."
Actually, I remember seeing this somewhere. I want to say it was on the old tech TV (back before G4 ran it into the ground). You hum the tune of the song or audio clip and it matches it to similar sounding audio files.
(As I was writing this I remembered the name)
Query by hum, here is the website. querybyhum.cs.nyu.edu
Interesting and fun, although not particularly useful, there are more efficient ways to search data (Metadata), although this way may be more natural to the way humans work. Not to mention the fact that it requires a rather time intensive process of creating profiles of each audio file to be matched against.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Being a classical music geek, I am always skeptical, and i suppose somewhat jaded, in this world that worships the latest pop idol, so I said to myself, "yeah, we'll see about this" and popped into the search field the text from Walt Whitman, "Behold the sea" used by Ralph Vaughan Williams" in his first symphony. What do you know. It even even had a link to the apple i-tunes store which open itunes to the track. Next I tried "Ich habe genug" and not only did I get a handful of recordings of Bach's cantata BWV 82, it also found the recitative from the Magnificat. Thinking maybe it only indexed the titles, I tried some interior text from the cantata like "Mein Trost ist nur allein" and it still found it. This works much better than I expected. Cool.