Is there a way to search for musical notes?

Factual Questions
1

There is a beautiful Chinese melody I’ve heard that I’d like to view on YouTube, or get lyrics translated, but I don’t know the song’s name! (I injected this question into a Cafe Society thread, but with no response.)

I’ve tried to transcribe the song’s initial notes below, but be aware that (1) this is from memory and my musical ear is very untrained, (2) I don’t know what key the song would usually be played in.

I’ve made longer notes upper-case, and added a '-mark after notes below C. Here’s the initial part of the melody:

ccdeca’G’CdecA’ccdEegAagageDcca’DDdcEcCageca’C

Immediately after this initial part, the melody goes up an octave and becomes more beautiful. I’ve not tried to transcribe further because of the increasing risk of error, and because anyone who knows the song can probably recognize it from the notes above.

2

Are you thinking of Sukiyaki?

Also, the original is not in Chinese, but in Japanese (Ue o muite arukō). More information available at Wikipedia.

3

Thank you! Yes. Thank you!

Your link won’t be my favorite rendition, but I’ll enjoy Googling and YouTubing for more.

4

Wow, nice.

The SDMB should start a music ID service.

5

That’s fucking amazing!

6

Quite some time ago (70s) a method was described for searching for tunes. The first note was an asterisk, the subsequent notes were R (repeat), U (up), D (down) depending on their relation to the preceding note. About 12 to 16 notes would be sufficient to identify a tune. No knowledge of keys or octaves necessary. I’ve no idea if this method ever took off or is in current practice, however.

7

Some music search things use it.

8

Kyu Sakamoto (the singer of the original melody), is one of my favorite Japanese singers. His tragic death in a plane crash was, well, tragic. Why the name change from ‘Ue wo muite arukou’ [let’s walk looking up] to ‘Sukiyaki’ [a type of meat hotpot], I’ll never know. It would be like renaming ‘Moon River’ to ‘Double Cheeseburger.’

9

I tried that site (just now, not pre-thread), starting with
RUUDDDUUUDDURUURUURDUDDDDRD
and then
RUUDDDUUUDDURUURUURDUDDDDRDURRDUDRUDDDDU
and got oodles of results, beginning with Fleetwood Mac the Chain and a Bach.
All displayed results on first page had Buy-MP3 icons next to them! I didn’t wade through the scores of responses on additional pages; maybe the one I wanted was there, but the site couldn’t find a Buy-MP3 icon for it.

BTW, I was unable to use Ctrl-V to paste into that site’s form, and had to retype by hand. Why?

The meter’s no good. How about
Cheeeeeeeese burger
With o-onions and fries!
I’m craving that for lunch…
… Todayyyy!
… and, speaking of the name change, as I mentioned earlier the song is on Thai TV now with words changed to commercial for MK restaurants! :eek: ::eek::

10

Brilliant! I’m totally singing that version next time I do karaoke.

11

There are a number of sites that do song matching based on a recorded or hummed snippet of music - basically they do a Fast Fourier Transform on the input and sample it to get a profile similar to the one used above - this is then compared to the song corpus. A guy wrote some demo code and got a cease-and-desist letter from a major music search site. I’m guessing he was on the right track.

Si

12

**tomndebb **posted in another thread a link to “How to Identify Songs Using Melody”. I just got the name to “Lover’s Concerto” without being able to decipher a single lyric, just by typing in the first 4 measures.

13

My mystery melody has been solved, thanks to randomstar, but searching for melodies seems like it might be fun.

Which link did you use? Your posted link links to a list of links. I tried four of them in the keyboard/mouse categories; two ended up back at useless musipedia; two resulted in “Not responding” pages. Musipedia’s top choice now was Nobuo Uematsu: Final Fantasy VII Main Theme but, despite the Japanese connection, it didn’t sound like my melody at all.

I hope the algorithm is “fuzzy” enough to cope with minor keying errors by me. I might enjoy experimenting on that question, but first I’d need ONE website which actually works!

Because I have poor Google-fu, and am easily annoyed, I prefer ONE good link over a list of links of uneven quality.

(I don’t know if the “Not responding”'s were due to their viruses conflicting with my own viruses/antiviruses, or what. Perhaps it was Fujacks-infected .exe’s needed by Java (though one might then hope for an explicit error message), which I’d removed hoping to treat my Fujacks. Fujacks, like herpes, is hard to eradicate but I’ve had several consecutive clean scans by Ad-aware now – keep fingers crossed. (Sorry for the Fujack hijack, which belongs in another thread, presumably in BBQ Pit.))

14

I found my song using the virtual keyboard at http://www.melodycatcher.com/

15

Thank you. This was one I tried, and trying again it still freezes.

My guess is it needs the Java .exe I quarantined because it was Fujacks-infected. Yes, my machine needs some repair work, but it’s low-priority because it still does almost all of what I use it for.