[F_minor] GG: OT: Beethoven, Bytes and Humming To Your PC

["pzumst" <pzumst@bluewin.ch>]

My fellow Gouldians

This thread is slighty off-topic, but still sort of Gould-relatet because at least in my humble opinion one of GG's (and Marsh McLuhans) visions is about to come true.

Music Information Retrieval or Semantic Music Recognition is a fairly new discipline in software engineering (or the music industry for that matter)

Now software that tells you that you might like artist abc because you bought music from xyz is no new thing.
But what if you don't know the name of the tune or artist ? Or you want to know more about different interpretations of a certain piece of music ?

Software engineers at the Max Planck Institute, the University of Bonn, Germany and other places are currentyl developing software that will allow you to whistle (or hum if you dare) the fragment of a melody into a PC. The software will then search a database and eventually find what you were looking for. 

Max-Planck Institute Notify Whistle Online
http://www-mmdb.iai.uni-bonn.de/forschungprojekte/midilib/english/

I also heard a demo of a software called SyncPlayer on the BBC. It did not only recognize Beethovens 5th, but also allows the user to switch between various interpretations stored in the database (in this particular case between a recording of Bernstein and GG without any flaw in pitch or tempo in realtime) and where the theme has also been used. Musicologists, Music Historians et al may find this quite interesting I reckon.

SyncPlayer Home Page
http://audentify.iai.uni-bonn.de/synchome/index.php?pid=02

MIR is still in its infancy, but might have enormous potential. I for one think GG may have found interest in such developments . Or just curious wether the PC would recognize what he was just humming or find his Mozart Piano Sonata interpretations. Or at least quite pleased, Gould probably more than Marsh :)

Regards
Pat

_______________________________________________
F_minor mailing list
F_minor@email.rutgers.edu
https://email.rutgers.edu/mailman/listinfo/f_minor