Soon, download songs by singing to PCs

The day is not far when people will just have to sing their favourite songs to their personal computers in order to activate search requests for the tracks and their download, say researchers.

Sydney, July 25 : The day is not far when people will just have to sing their favourite songs to their personal computers in order to activate search requests for the tracks and their download, say researchers.

Australian computer scientist Dr Sandra Uitdenbogerd from RMIT University is of the opinion that the next generation of search programs will allow the storage and retrieval of music by singing.

She says that all an Internet user will have to do is just call up a specific website and then sing a tune or lyrics into a computer microphone to submit their query. The computer will then search the website's database to retrieve a menu of digital files, which the user can then choose from to download.

Although Uitdenbogerd admits that many hurdles before the development of such programs are yet to be overcome, she insists that the field is gaining momentum.

"I think because there is a lot of interest out there and there are some commercial companies trying to solve the problem," ABC Science quoted Uitdenbogerd, who outlined developments at a recent Human Communication Science Network forum at Macquarie University, as saying.

"In the next three or four years it should be on the computer of everyone who is a music fanatic," she added.

Uitdenbogerd, however, concedes that the quality of the user's voice may affect the search.

"The more in tune and accurate you are the less you will have to sing" because the computer will recognise the notes more easily, and the more out of tune a person is, the longer he will have to sing, says Uitdenbogerd.

But still "most people can get the ups and downs" of a tune "in the right place", she reckons.

Environmental noise is another big hurdle as these outside influences can affect the frequency of the notes the program is trying to interpret.

"Audio is just a wave form that goes up and down and doesn't bear much resemblance to how we perceive [music] as notes," says Uitdenbogerd.

She, however, thinks that it is easier to solve the retrieval problems by focusing on just one genre of music, for instance operatic arias.

Uitdenbogerd is also looking at audio searches by instrument timbre and by mood. If a person wants music with a "fat bass sound", it can be used as the main criteria for the search, she says. The mood search will be based on predicting what mood the music conveys.

ANI