Songs and sound effects can be heard but how do you enter them as text into a search engine or sound effects website?
Dun Dun Dun Sound
In search of a sound effect recently I Googled “dun dun dun” to see if I would get any relevant results and, to my surprise, the first match was spot on. It was a link to a site with a dun dun dun wav file. This was a very positive start I clicked the link pressed the play button and out of my speakers came that sound effect often reserved for horror movies dun dun dun played on a timpani! Next time you’re searching for a sound try spelling it into a search engine for instance a longer, more dramatic, horror movie intro could be “dun dun dun dun dun” or the famous theme from the Jaws movie could become “dun dun dun dun dun dun”. The possibilities are endless!
Music Recognition
On a similar subject or sound and music recognition I stumbled upon the closest thing yet to an audio search engine this week. I’ve had the Shazam app, for identifying music, on my phone for a while now and it works pretty well. The Midomi search engine allows you to search for a tune using your computer’s microphone to sing or hum the tune into it. After a 10 second recording of you singing or humming it will go away and try and match your efforts to it’s database of music sound profiles. It worked when I sung “Happy Birthday” into it but failed for Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nacht Musik (perhaps that was my singing and not the fault of Midomi!) There’s still a way to go but with Google now accepting voice searches and YouTube transcribing some videos fairly well the future is bright.
Music Recognition Software
You can download Tunatic a piece of music recognition software that helps to tag music. It’s available for Windows and Mac.
Music Recognition App
Midomi also has a paid app that it calls “the world’s fastest music identifier” it’s called SoundHound and is available for the iPod Touch, iPhone and the iPad.
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