A Name-That-Tune website! / Holiday Music

I had just got this brilliant idea for a website that would do online what the fabulous book by Barlow and Morgenstern (now selling on Amazon for $185) did for music lovers: enable you to look up the composer and name of a tune that you can write out using the names of the piano keys, e.g. CDE-EGF- and so on.  I was just about to contact all my computer geek buddies to see if we could put such a site together.

Unfortunately, I have just this minute discovered that the concept has already been implemented on the Web.  The site is called Musipedia, a very simple and effective tool to identify classical music themes.  Here's how you use it.

At the website (and why am I wasting your time and mine describing all this?  You could easily discover the routine by going to the site) they give you a choice of methods of putting in the tune.  There is a Flash-based keyboard that you can "play" with a mouse, which transcribes the tune (not too accurately, since the rhythm you enter is at the mercy of how good you are with a mouse), and then, when you click the Search button, the site looks up the closest match to your tune in its database, and gives you the half-dozen top matches.

I tried to match a certain tune that my mother used to sing around the house, but the words to which I could not remember.  (My mother used to sing lots of goofy songs from the thirties and forties, when she was growing up.)  Here's the tune, if you're interested:

The software suggested a string quartet by Mozart, and a variety of other losing matches.  I wonder whether there is a way of adding entries to their database once you discover the name of the tune and its composer. . .  I suppose there must be; there is a disclaimer that suggests that they really can't take responsibility for contributed information, just like Wikipedia.

An interesting problem that crops up is the following: if there is no exact match (and there generally will not be one), how does it measure how close an approximate match is?  In other words, every tune --at least conceptually-- can be imagined as being surrounded by other tunes that are close to it.  This is the idea of Topology: in a collection of objects, what objects are a given object close to?  In fact, topology addresses the idea of what points are next to each other.  For instance, if you take a rectangle, and consider the points at the left edge to be right next to the points are the right edge, you turn the rectangle into a cylinder, because you have glued the left edge to the right edge topologically.

By changing the gluing procedure slightly, you can make a Möbius strip.  Just consider the points at the left edge near the top be "next to" the points at the right edge near the bottom, and vice versa.  This way, it is as if you have glued the two edges after twisting them.  (If you give the paper two twists, it may as well be a cylinder, mathematically, which you can appreciate by thinking about who is "next to" whom!)

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

One thing I'm pretty vague about is non-sacred music for the Holidays.  At one time I scorned the usual "secular" Christmas tunes, because basically I knew so many carols that I just didn't have time for Jingle Bells, and that ilk.  But, over the years, there were a goodly number of holiday favorites that I missed if I didn't hear them once the weather got cold.

The rather small list of songs that I grudgingly got to like are, in addition to Jingle Bells: Winter Wonderland (ugh), Let It Snow, The Christmas Song ("Chestnuts roasting on an open fire..."), Need a little Christmas, Sleigh Ride by Leroy Anderson, Silver Bells, Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and a few others that elude me at the moment.  Oh; John Lennon's Merry Christmas, War is Over; and So this is Christmas.  (The Beatles, evidently, enjoyed Christmas hugely, judging from the many gems they dreamed up for the members of their Fan Club.  In their Messages, of course, they affected a Tired Of It All attitude, but you can see through it.)

I would like to get myself a CD that has most of the better-known (non-sacred) Christmas and Holiday songs and tunes, but I don't know which one to get.  It is actually possible to sing these songs badly; I really prefer not to get get Perry Como singing them all, or even Julie Andrews, though the latter comes closest to the artist who can sing almost anything beautifully.  Deck the Halls, We Wish you a Merry Christmas, and a few other songs are really secular carols, even if they are placed in a Christian context.  So this is an invitation for anyone reading this to send in their nominations for best Christmas CD (non-sacred)!