Name that tune

[simont]

I woke up this morning with a fragment of a tune running round my head, and no idea where it came from. I've just managed to identify it, thankfully, but it's been driving me mad in the two hours between then and now; and there's another tune fragment which I've been trying to identify for months if not years.

What I'd therefore like to do is to post the tune in my diary so that all my readers can see if they know it; but I don't know of any sensibly standard way to represent music in ASCII. I could sing it into a microphone and post a link to an MP3 (or, probably more usefully, synthesise it programmatically into an MP3, which wouldn't require recording hardware and also wouldn't involve my poor singing voice complicating the issue), or I could write it down in musical notation and post a link to a picture; but both of those solutions strike me as woefully wasteful of bandwidth given that the actual information content of the few bars I can remember ought in principle to be no more than a line or two of text. I could enter it into some sort of sequencer program and post the file saved from that, but that suffers from standardisation problems: it would limit my audience to people with the same sequencer program.

If only everybody had a Spectrum, I could post a sequence of BEEP commands which would play the tune, and this would actually be a more standard low-bandwidth approach than anything else I'd thought of. It even briefly occurred to me that you can get Spectrum emulators for most operating systems… But that's not a good idea either, because the trouble with Spectrum emulators is that you can't cut and paste into them, so it would be a matter of everyone manually typing in the BEEP commands I posted.

I must be missing something obvious. Is there no sensible way at all for me to post a few lines in a text-based forum and have the majority of readers be able to cut and paste that text into something which will convert it into a possibly recognisable tune?

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Don't the notes have names like C and D#? Can't you just write those down?

Or find a font with music notes in, or write a program which will draw them in ascii art?

Come to think of it, parhaps a gif of the music *is* the right solution -- it should compress fairly well, no?

[simont]

Writing down the note names is only half the problem. You also have to write down which octave they're in (C followed by G could equally plausibly be going up or down, and it makes a difference which), and also specify the note durations and any rests in between. Also you have to make it clear enough that it isn't too much effort for the reader to reassemble it in their own head...

I think I'm currently leaning more towards audio solutions than musical notation ones, simply because not everybody can read music.

(That said, my work PC doesn't have working sound, so audio wouldn't be good for me if someone else posted a tune. Perhaps pseudomonas is right, and my best bet is to use a format which can be converted into audio or a printed score.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I assumed recognising a famous a snippet was likely to have relatively simple timing/octave, to the extent you could just write it in brackets or something, or use an accent mark (which most people should figure out). ("GGGEb...")

"I think I'm currently leaning more towards audio solutions than musical notation ones, simply because not everybody can read music."

Indeed. Though there's probably some correlation between not recognising stuff and

Have you tried services like http://www.shazam.com/music/ where you ring them up and hum it and they tell you the answer? I've never tried it, but I've heard it's a lot better than I expected.

[simont]

The website suggests you're supposed to hold the phone out to the actual music, and doesn't mention humming it. I fear that might imply it matches on more than just the primary tune, which might imply that humming won't work.

I would certainly like to see a working tune search engine...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Mmm. But I'm sure I remember *some* service it was worth trying with. It'd almost be worth the cost of the call just out of curiousity imho

[songster.livejournal.com]

Write it out on a proper stave, scan it, post the link?

[songster.livejournal.com]

I take on board the point that many people can't read music - on the other hand, those who can actually answer your question are vastly more likely to be able to...

[simont]

That was one of the things I suggested in my original post. I could do it, but it seems woefully wasteful of bandwidth by comparison with what ought to be achievable.

[songster.livejournal.com]

Hum. Only if you're considering *your* bandwidth and processor time, as compared to everyone else's who has to decode the information from the textual representation, surely? I include wetware processor time in this calculation.

[simont]

This is where we came in. If there were something of roughly the order of Spectrum BASIC available on every damn machine in the modern computing world, then there'd be no wetware time involved at all. I'd post some BEEP commands, everyone who cared would cut and paste them into their nearest BASIC window, and the tune would immediately come out of their speakers.

It's precisely the fact that there simply doesn't seem to be anything nearly so convenient in modern operating systems which annoyed me. This post was mainly an effort to find out if there was anything obvious I'd missed. It appears not.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

There are unicode characters for music notes, presumably with <pre> and <s> or <u> you could mock up a stave to display them on.