Here I am blaring my music and watching my mesmerizing winamp plugins (puts graphics to the beat, preferably with psychedelic images) when an idea pops into my head. Wouldn’t it be cool if the plugin could put the words in the music onto the screen too?
So is it possible for a program to recognize words by analyzing an mp3 or wav file? It’ll take a large dictionary and lots of computing power but is there enough information in the file to be able to figure out what’s being sung?
Do you have one of those voice-recognition packages? If you do, try having a friend who’s never used it before say random things in various voices while you blare an instrumental piece in the background and see how accurate the “recognized” words turn out.
I can’t see it working very well, but I suppose in 10 years or so it could be possible. On the other hand, I remember some program I used a while ago that could add lyrics to the MP3’s ID3 tag. Not exactly what you mean, but it’s something.
Watch Whoopi Goldberg in Jumping Jack Flash as she tries to make out the words that they are singing. Humans, which are undisputedly the best pattern recognition machines in the known universe, have an impossible time with lyrics. There’s no way that a voice recognition package will even come close in the next 10 years.
However, whenever I stick a CD into my computer, it first comes up with Track 1, Track 2, etc. for the names, then a short while later (after a bit of internet activity) the names are mysteriously filled in. Obviously Windows XP is yet again contacting the mother ship, this time asking it for song info. You could do basically the same thing. Keep a time based index of the lyrics, and display them at the appropriate time through the song.