Friday 24 April 2009

Search by Melody

I am very grateful for this post which points at this resource - a tool where you can search for chants by melody. Okay, you need to have good enough relative pitch to be able to notate the melody; it's not at the point where you can just sing into a microphone and have the computer work things out. But it's a big step on from anything I've seen yet, and it does handle transposition, so relative-but-not-perfect-pitch thinkers like me don't have to remember the name of the starting pitch, just the relationship between the notes...

Remember this post where I was wondering about hospital chaplaincy and being able to find hymns that people could only remember bits of? That's a much bigger project: there are metrical considerations, and copyright considerations, and a constantly-expanding repertoire. But this is a start.

Pretty shiny, eh?

1 comment:

J L van Os said...

You said:
"Okay, you need to have good enough relative pitch to be able to notate the melody" etc.

To this purpose try the MelodyCatcher.com/

you can play, replay and correct any remembered melody in any key on a virtual keypoard and if available in the database you will find a MIDI of this melody and its source on the Internet.