Google for Music

Electrical engineers at UC San Diego are working on their music identification system. What adds a new twist to the formula is their efforts at taking a general, genre based approach at music selection. For example, when a user searches for "easy listening", the system will attempt to identify every song in its database that it determines to be "easy listening" and return the results as a recommended list to the user. The key point, of course, is to understand that the software (and to some extent, hardware) will be able to determine the genre by analyzing the digital information that represents the music. 

Apparently, the system had trouble with Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. I can't blame it.

The system will need initial parameters in order to determine what types of music fit into what types of genres. The researchers originally paid students to listen to songs and label them manually, but switched to a new model that involved members of the social-networking site Facebook playing a series of games which accomplishes the same objective. Named Herd-It, the game involves users listening to music, identifying instruments, and finally labeling the songs in order to earn points in a high score table. The closer a player's submission matches the normative answers among all players of the game, the higher the score.

The researchers are also saving money. Hiding a research effort in the guise of a game allows them to utilize a human computer farm at the cost of a few hours of programming.

From A Queen Song To A Better Music Search Engine [Science Daily]