Naming that Tune
I was going to put a picture up here this morning so you’d have something to look at and not be bothered by all these words. But instead I was seized with trying to find the title and artist of this song I heard on the radio last night when I was driving home from work.

I have a little tape recorder in the car, but it was buried in the bottom of my bag covered with magazines, yoga clothes and empty plastic lunch containers. I keep it in case I have a brilliant thought so I can preserve it for later or I can make lists of reminders of things I need to do. It might be a better idea to keep the recorder in a more handy place, but that’s not the point here.

When I hear a song I like on the radio, I have two strategies for tracking it down. The first is to remember some lyrics and plug those with the word, lyrics, into a search engine. Then I spend the rest of the drive home with the radio off repeating over and over, “dust in the wind … all we are is dust in the wind …” and I enter the house and shout, “Don’t talk to me, I have to remember this song” and I sprint to the computer and boot it up, standing there, tapping my foot, “dust in the wind … all we are is dust in the wind …”.

This has been about 50% successful. But (a) lyric sites are generally ugly, ad laden and sploggy, and (b) if you only remember a snippet, in my case, something about atmosphere you get about 10,000 results plus in my case, atmosphere is also the name of a band but not the band I’m looking for.

My other strategy is to go to the iTunes store and pull up the 100 most popular songs in my suspected genre, in this case I thought it would be alternative, and I scroll through and listen to samples of songs that could be it. The drawbacks to this are (a) it takes forever (b) the song might not be in the top 100 and (c) who knows for sure what the genre is?

Yesterday I read about a new method to search a song called: Songtapper. But this morning I didn’t remember that it was called Songtapper so I had to go back and check my regularly read blogs to see if I could find the post and that didn’t work. So then I tried a search engine and again, trying to narrow your results using words like song search keyboard tap. I eventually found the site.

The way it works is you tap the rhythm of the song on your keyboard and it returns a list of songs. The post I saw said it worked. So, having struck out with the lyrics and getting tired of clicking on samples at the iTunes store, I tried Songtapper. I tapped my song and then waited.

This whole chain of events took place this morning and I left for work approximately 65 minutes after I got out of bed, I packed a lot into a short morning. You can understand why there was no time for a picture. Finally it returns my songlist and WTF? I got “Bad to the Bone,” a Green Day song and a John Philip Sousa thing.

How does that even happen? Am I being punk’d? Am I a bad tapper? What do these songs even have in common? None of these is even remotely like my song. The site advised that if it didn’t return my song I could enter in the name so it would learn it for next time. If, only.

Maybe one of my three readers can help me. If you were tapping it out on your keyboard it goes: tuh-tuh tuh-Tuh-tuh-tuh tuh-tuh tuh-tuh tuh-Tuh-tuh-tuh and it’s something about the atmosphere, maybe you’re floating through my atmosphere and it sounds maybe like The Shins. Maybe it is The Shins. Next time I have my iTune store open I’ll check.