[Sigia-l] "Search Inside the Music"

[Fred Beecher]

On 7/12/06, Davezilla <davezilla at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/12/06, Ziya Oz <listera at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > music that works with a particular scene. Eventually, we could even get to
> > the point where a person could hum a few bars and the system could identify
> > the song and locate a commercial version.
>
> <sarcasm> Mr. Lamere has clearly never spoken to DJs, who will argue
> endlessly over whether something is classified as trance or goa or
> trip hop, etc. They're worse than we are. </sarcasm>
> ;^)

As an IA who is *also* an electronic musician, I wholly agree with you. : )

And while this technology might be a good idea, there are some things
it just will never be good for, such as a lot of electronic music. How
are you going to search on "instrumentation" when the sounds on each
song are different? In certain of the more formulaic genres (trance,
etc.) it might be possible, but in most it would be near impossible.

A good indexing system should not be flummoxed by innovation, and it
seems like this system would easily choke on, say, anything from
Stockhausen to Skinny Puppy.

- Fred