VentureBeat

Ever hear a catchy tune but not know the name of the song or the artist? Midomi, a web site and mobile service, lets you play a recorded song or sing a snippet of it yourself, and then it matches that information to its library of more than 17 million song samples. Then, you can listen to the recommended samples and go buy the song on iTunes or watch related videos on YouTube.

Midomi’s parent company, San Jose, Calif.-based Melodis, has just raised $7 million from TransLink Capital, JAIC America and Global Catalyst Partners, on top of a previous $5 million in funding.

This, I had to test for myself. Using the Midomi iPhone application, I warbled in my rendition of the perennial karaoke favorite Unchained Melody (the high part, you know, “I neeeeeed your loooooove”). Midomi matched my emotional outpouring to works of Stevie Wonder, The Flaming Lips and a bunch of songs that weren’t in English, but no Righteous Brothers. So I tried out something more within my voice range — the classic hit House of the Rising Sun — and the service worked.

Midomi originally launched last year to mixed reviews (see comments on our original story).

Midomi’s not alone in trying to do this form of music search. Rival Shazam matches recorded tunes you play with its own library, but for better or worse doesn’t let you sing the tunes yourself. Both companies also have iPhone apps — Shazam has the 27th most popular free iPhone app, while Midomi comes in at 71st. Shazam has also recently raised $6.6 million in funding, on top of previous funding that the company told us was in the “multiple millions.”

Midomi, a new company in Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale), has just launched an impressive musical search service.

If you hum, or sing a song, Midomi will likely recognize what you’re singing. So if you get a song in your head, and you don’t know what it is, go to Midomi. It will show you the most likely results, based on the signatures of songs it has in its database, and lets you go to a store to buy them.

That’s just the beginning. Midomi lets you see the people who have hummed the same songs, showing you those who sang most similar to you. It lets you chat with those people through a message box. It also lets you store your tune in its database for others to hear.

For example, see the screenshot below for Midomi’s results when I sang “Morning has Broken” into a microphone. At right, it shows that Cat Stevens was the original singer, and lets me buy the song at Amazon.com. At left you’ll see the profiles of the people who sounded most like me. At bottom, it gives other possible results. I can click on their profiles, listen and message them.

Midomi blows away Nayio Media, the San Mateo company that launched a humming search last month. If Nayio recognizes your tune, it cross-references with Napster’s library of songs. But the trouble is the recognition part. We tried humming “Morning has Broken,” but the song wasn’t represented on the first page of results. On Midomi, it was the first result, even when we hummed. Midomi gets better when you use words.

It was launched by two engineering PhDs from Stanford, Keyvan Mohajer (who studied music recognition), and Majid Emami, along with Stanford science grads James Hom and Michal Grabowski. The technology is self-built, called MMARS, or multi-modal adaptive recognition system. Midomi looks at pitch variation, like Nayio does, but it goes deeper, looking at tempo variation, phonetic content and location of pauses. If you hum a wrong note, it will often find ways to override it, by filtering it with other close signatures in its system. It isn’t perfect. While it recognized me humming “I Just Called to Say I Love you” immediately, it failed to do it on a later try when I hummed it quickly, without care. But once I added the words to my tune, it picked it up even when I sang quickly.

It gives you a studio, too, where you can pick out songs to sing — to help, it lets you play a 30-second track and see the lyrics — and lets you tag them, so that they are stored in the database. See a tour of the Midomi service here.

For copyright reasons, Midomi won’t let you upload your own songs, though that may change in the future. We did encounter a few bugs. Some sample tracks (it has licensed two million 30-second clips) didn’t play correctly (the audio didn’t come through). And one major caution: When we tried to download a software required before you can buy the songs, Midomi shut down the entire browser without warning. We still haven’t been able to download that software. We’ll update once Midomi fixes this.

The company’s goal is to become world’s most comprehensive database, Mohajer tells VentureBeat.

The Midomi service is their first product. They’ve formed a company called Melodis, and they want to move into other areas, such as speech recognition that will beat existing players like Nuance or Tellme. They’ve already implemented text recognition in Midomi. If type a search term “Ooops Britni Spirs,” it will recognize you are searching for the song by Britney Spears. Midomi also wants make the service easy to use for mobile devices.

The company has 15 employees in Sunnyvale, and another dozen developers in Eastern Europe and India. It has raised “multiple millions” from Global Catalyst Partners, and angel funding from Amidzad and former Googler, Aydin Senkut.