Name That iTune

Khoi

20 years ago

The current generation of iPods can be had with a hard drive as big as 40 Gigabytes, and the iPod Photo can be had in a 60 Gigabyte model. If you don’t limit yourself to the storage available in a portable digital music player, you can have an exponentially more capacious warehouse for all of your MP3s on your computer’s hard disk — a desktop computer with a 250 Gigabyte internal drive is not uncommon these days. That’s a lot of music. So it occurred to me this morning, when the chorus of some half-remembered song popped into my head inexplicably and then haunted me all the way to the office, that iTunes and iPods — or whatever substitutes you care to name — still don’t allow you to find that one song that goes something like “Doo de dum de doo…” You know the one I’m talkin’ about?

That is, all of these digital music management systems allow you to search for a song by meta data in text form — artist name, song name, album name, genre, date, etc. — but you still can’t find a song that you remember for its most fundamental characteristic: what it sounds like. Maybe it’s impractical to ask a computer to recognize the few bars of a tune that you can hum, but there must be some other way to identify a track you have locked in your head (I remember seeing plot-finders that allow you to find similarly remembered/forgotten movies a few years ago, but they seem to have gone away) — and anyway, why can’t you just hum into your computer? With speech recognition continually ‘just around the corner,’ this would seem to be an ideal use for it. Wouldn’t that be incredibly handy? Moreover, wouldn’t that be an effective way to sell more songs on the iTunes Music Store?