In a nutshell...

Sing into your phone and Midomi will name that tune. In theory, anyway…

What’s it good for?

Telling you the name of the song that’s been soldered into your brain all day. When it works.

Judgement time...

Feeling a little jealous towards phone users able to discover a song’s name and artist just by holding up their mobile and letting it listen for a few seconds? Well, music-seeking social networking service Midomi has launched a mobile app that should give your Nok the skills to recognise any track you hum or sing into it.

Well, that’s the idea at least. We’ll freely admit to not having the greatest set of lungs, but we gave it a whiz by screeching a dozen or so songs (some very popular, some obscure, some in the middle) into our N95. God knows what the neighbours were thinking. Anyway, of the songs we tried most were wrongly identified (some hilariously inaccurately), while the few that were, with one exception, were all extremely well known ditties: stuff like Sinatra’s “New York, New York” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called...”. So songs you’d really expect to work, in other words.

The problem seems to stem from the way Midomi works. It doesn’t consult some sort of omniscient electronic muso-brain to turn up the names of obscure tracks - it relies on the recordings made by its users. See, anyone who signs up to the service can sit down at their PC, belt out a few bars then label their recording with the song and artist details. This then goes into a database which is checked when a user’s looking for a tune: anything that resembles the user’s recording should lead to the correct title and artist being given.

Not a bad idea on paper, but many of the recordings bear so little resemblance to the actual song (you can listen to them on your mobile when a track is identified) that it’s no wonder Midomi has trouble matching them.

The fact that it relies on users’ contributions is Midomi’s real problem. In addition to the quality issue, there’s also the fact that there are barely any obscure songs on the database - almost everything people record is a chart hit. Which begs the question: what purpose does Midomi really serve?