Music Search: Will Tomorrow Ever Come?

Last week, Rediff announced its revolutionary new ringtone search interface, and my ears pricked up. (You can try it out for yourself by going here, filling out their questionnaire about your phone and using the resulting interface.)

Results? Not bad. They've put some thought into this. 60,000 tunes is reasonable, and they've got you covered if you don't remember the title or singer but remember what movie it was in.

Not bad. But far from revolutionary. Since most of the tracks are Bollywood, I wouldn't know too many lyrics, but lyric search is just a good idea on general principle. Don't tell me it can't be done: the idea of a lyrics database is almost ten years old, and the music industry is a touch more enlightened about how searchability helps sales than it was back in 1999.

Lyrics aren't music, of course, and the lyrics of Beethoven's Fifth, the Superman movie theme and many ringtones are exactly the same. Which begs the question: why hasn't anyone tried, even in a very primitive interface, to make music searchable as music? Google, so far, contents itself with providing some info on musicians. Yahoo at least offers an audio search, but like Rediff, the Apple Store and everyone else, all it does is apply the principles of text-searching to the parts of music that can be rendered as words.

What about when you know your tastes, but don't necessarily know what you want? If it's you're searching Amazon for a book, you're likely to discover what you're looking for, but if you're searching for a song like the Superman theme, you might mistakenly pick up Eminem's "Superman" or that song from "Scrubs."

What about "search for similar tunes?"

"Search for a minor key?"

"Search for tempo?"

"Hum a few bars into your microphone and we can pick it up for you?"

How about cross-referencing that with the more traditional text-searches?

And at the very least can we see some more genre search?

I'm a search idealist, and I know it. But these kinds of questions are worth asking. High standards are what gave us Google in the first place.

(CORRECTION: Apparently I'm not the only one asking these questions, after all. More on Sun's ideas and the potential they represent, tomorrow.)