You hum it son...

There's a fascinating new piece of technological wizardry that has just been announced quietly on the internet.

According to www.tech2.com, a new type of search engine has just been launched that "allows users to search for music by singing, whistling or humming a few bars of a song to identify the track." You can also apparently search using your keyboard, and the searchable database is based on user contribution.

"The MARS Search extracts a variety of features from the tune including speech, pitch, tempo, and even the location of pauses. It analyzes each element independently and adapts to the stronger components. For instance, it takes speech content into account if the user sings the lyrics and ignores speech content if the user hums or whistles the song. With its next generation search tools, MARS Search is the first search engine that can match human voice to human voice by analyzing these multiple features."

It doesn't say at the moment how accurate you have to be, but don't you think that would make an interesting search engine? How about adding marks out of 10 for how accurately you can hum it? What happens if you are humming Madonna's Like a Virgin and you get Beethoven's Fifth as a result? Are they going to record the hummings and play the best on YouTube?

You can find it at www.midomi.com

I think it's an excellent idea - wonder if they're looking for a resident singing teacher?

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