Below, one of those cool things that just drop into the inbox and jump-start the day, like a strong cup of coffee. As it says, "Musicologically engaged computer scientists take note!" Also music archivists. Amayah Keshet
________________________________ ------ Forwarded Message From: Humanist Discussion Group [email protected] Midomi finds music by taking a sample that you hum, sing or get from the immediate environment or whose artist or title you speak; once the music is found (often in multiple versions) it gives you a snippet to play and, if you wish, connects you to iTunes so that you can buy the music. Of course there are problems, esp if you cannot carry a tune. Sometimes what Midomi finds is not what you sang or hummed but something related, it may seem -- by genre? by mood? (BTW, Midomi is free. Thanks to Chris Chesher for showing me this one.) Musicologically engaged computer scientists take note! In an interview published in Ubiquity (http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/t_winograd_1.html), Terry Winograd describes his encounter with what we now do every day: > What surprised me, which Google was part of, is that > superficial search techniques over large bodies of stuff could > get you what you wanted. I grew up in the AI tradition, where > you have a complete conceptual model, and the information > retrieval tradition, where you have complex vectors of key > terms and Boolean queries. The idea that you can index > billions of pages and look for a word and get what you want > is quite a trick. To put it in more abstract terms, it's the > power of using simple techniques over very large numbers > versus doing carefully constructed systematic analysis. As I am fond of pointing out the basic idea was envisioned in the late 1970s by a Bell Northern engineer, Gordon B Thompson ("a man of wit and original mind"), and published in "Memo from Mercury: Information technology is different" by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, Montreal (June 1979). What I take that idea to be is, I suppose, part of the argument for augmenting human capacities rather than trying to replace them: that searching could be made enormously more powerful by combining traces of human intelligence with machine processing. In the case of Midomi, the trace in question is embodied knowledge of the music one wants to find or the music itself. ------ End of Forwarded Message
