Music Information Retrieval Systems

This week, I wish I had more time to devote to what we're studying in class. It's one of the most interesting things we've talked about so far: cross-linguistic and multimedia information retrieval systems.

Many of you are probably familiar with cross-linguistic IR systems--just go to Google and play with its ability to translate foreign web pages into English, or head over to Babelfish and experiment with its machine translation.

Multimedia IR systems are another matter, though. How can we search for things that aren't expressed in text? Image IR systems have ways of analyzing color and shape in pictures. And music IR systems can analyze things like pitch, melody, etc.

Part of our assignment this week was to choose a multimedia IR system and try a search in it, then report what we did and what we found.

These are the three music IR systems we were given as examples. Play around with them; they're fun! The technology allows users to search by tune rather than by song title or artist.

Tunespotting lets you search by arranging the notes yourself, playing the tune on your computer keyboard (which I found difficult), and also by the regular method of text relating to the tune.

This one is based more around pop music: Midomi. It boasts of being the "ultimate music search"--I wouldn't exactly agree since most of what it has is popular, but if you're looking for a tune like that, I've found it to be spot on so far.

Musipedia is very cool. Probably my favorite of these three, it allows searching by singing the tune (as in Midomi), playing it on a virtual keyboard, contour, or rhythm.

Enjoy!

This is your brain on Google.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.”

Is Google Making Us Stupid? (Atlantic Monthly)

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this?

Haven't these people read M.T. Anderson's Feed?

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I'm beginning to think that Google is, in fact, evil (and I'm only partially being tongue-in-cheek).

Take a Seat

Tired of heading to the library for some research only to find there's no room? Take a gander at this potential solution: