Have you ever tried to remember the title of a song and who sang it? A new application called Midomi says it can help you find music simply by singing a few bars:

Midomi.com makes it fun and easy to find and discover music and people. For the first time, you can use your voice to instantly connect to your favorite music, and to a community of people that share your musical interests. Listen to voices, see pictures, rate singers, send messages, buy music, and more.

You click on the “voice search” button and start singing. It helps to sing for at least 10 seconds unless you are hopelessly out of tune. I admit it feels very strange to be serenading your computer screen.

I tried Midomi by singing “Yesterday” (Beatles) and it worked. Midomi produced an accurate search results page. What’s intriguing is that you can listen to other people’s renditions of various songs. I can see how much fun it could be to put together a “Worst Of Midomi” compilation — atonal people singing butchering their favorite songs, a reverse “Idols”.

But Midomi is not perfect. I decided to test if Midomi can search for non-English language songs. So I sang Dahil Sa ‘Yo, a traditional Filipino love song. The results were ugly: Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, Snoop Doggy Dog. Okay, I am not Pilita Corrales but I thought I did a pretty good job.

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch reviewed Midomi. It did not work for him. For whatever reason, it also produced search results featuring rappers:

New startup Midomi, a voice-based music search engine with a social network bolted on, launched earlier today. If you have a microphone connected to your computer, just sing or hum a few seconds of any song. In theory, Midomi will return a link to the original song for partial playback or purchase, and will also return results from other users who’ve recorded themselves singing that song. I’ve been testing this all morning. And I cannot come up with a single match. Not one. I think that my voice is to blame, though, as others testing it seem to have good results.

Read Michael’s review here.

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