Frank Nordberg wrote:
| John Henckel wrote:
| > Does anyone know of a tool to index MIDI files according to melody? I have
| > thousands of MIDI files and I want to be able to index them according to
| > the "do-re-mi" notes in the melody. Most of the MIDI files are simple SATB
| > arrangements.
| >
| > Also, does anyone know of a "name that tune" service on the web?
|
| John Chambers has an ABC based tune finder at
| http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/findtune.html
I'd thought of mentioning it, but this does the reverse of what he
asked about. If you give it a fragment of the name, it will return
you a list of the tunes with matching names. Going from the tune (in
your choice of notation) to the name is harder.
Recently, I did add a gimmick to it in response to an interesting
discussion of "tune contours". This lets you type in the start of a
tune in a form that merely says whether the notes go up, down or stay
the same, and it shows you matching tunes. I've used it a bit, and
found a few tunes this way. The server logs show that nobody else has
much experimented with it.
| There is also Themefinder at
| http://www.themefinder.org/
| but the catalogue is still too small to be reliable.
Yeah; I've looked at that one. I found that it wasn't easy to get a
match on anything at all. Even the best-known tunes, such as
sududdsudud (the opening notes of Happy Birthday) get no match. My
own tune finder does find matches for this, but they don't include
Happy Birthday, which doesn't seem to be on the Web in ABC form. I'd
add it, but I happen to know that it's under copyright. (Two points
to the first person to name the copyright holder. ;-)
This does remind me of an idea I've had for a while. There is a major
problem with discovering whether a tune is copyrighted. I've sent off
email to a number of sites that have web pages dealing with music
copyrights, asking them the question: If I have a tune in my head,
and want to know who (if anyone) owns the rights to the tune, where
would I go to look it up.
The responses that I've received may be summarized as "That's not our
problem." The situation seems to be that they own the copyright, and
finding out about it is your problem. About the only reliable way to
discover who owns a tune is to make a recording, and hope that
someone sues you for infringement.
However, it does seem that ABC might provide a practical solution to
this. What we do is start a repository of tunes of known origin, and
include a couple of ways of looking up tunes, such as this contour
idea. We invite owners of tunes to submit their tunes in ABC,
preferably as simply as they can, so as to make it easy to do the
matching. You could then type in the part of the tune you remember,
get back a list of all the matching tunes, and start playing through
them to see if any is the tune you're thinking of. The ABC headers
would contain email addresses and URLs for the owners, so you could
quickly ask for permission to use a tune.
Thinking that copyright owners would all rush to join this is, of
course, quite Pollyannish. Jerry Holland and Brenda Stubbert probably
would, but in this case, I'd just use links to the ABC tunes on their
web site, and I wouldn't even need to ask for permission. In fact, my
tune finder already knows about their site, and this scheme will work
right now. (Try the contour uddus+uds+udu, which will return 10
matches for Brenda Stubbert's Reel, including one at cranfordpub.com,
where you'll find Jerry's and Brenda's web sites.)
Jerry and Brenda are unusual, putting their tunes on the Web and
inviting us all to play them. I'd expect that most tune owners would
say "Hell, no" (if they even bothered to reply).
However, it's easy to think of a scenario that might persuade them.
Suppose some recording artist does a thorough check of such a
database, finds that a tune is apparently unknown, and records it.
The tune's owner sues, and the artist turns up in court with evidence
that the owner had been asked to submit the tune to our archive, but
they refused. Since there is actually no other known way to learn
about a copyright, one could easily argue that the owner was clearly
trying to entrap innocent artists by hiding the fact of the copyright
from people doing a well-intentioned search.
It's interesting to contemplate, anyway. Not that I necessarily want
to be the one getting involved with the lawyers. But we definitely do
have a problem here, in that we are expected to follow copyright laws
with no way to discover who owns a tune. For the first time, we
actually have a solution in hand. Whether the legal system would
allow a solution to the problem isn't obvious.
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