Every now and then I go in search of 2 house music tracks that got played often at the clubs I went to when I was in my teens in the late 80s/early 90s--Quick on Hubert St, Mars in the meatpacking district, Tunnel and Palace de Beaute. One of the tracks was "The Max," which played the baseline from Max Q's "Sometimes" as the hook. The other track I can still sound out, but have no idea what the name is. Had a bit of an "Acid Crash" sound to it.
For some reason, when I was a DJ, I just never went in search of these tracks at the time because having been lured to raves, I started playing music of the blip, bleep, and harder Detroit variety more often. But when I went out it was to house music clubs. In any case, tonight I spent a few hours looking for the elusive tracks again because I ran into this guy's YouTube page containing loads of classic house and rave tracks. Beatport makes searching for classic tracks easier, but I still came up empty handed.
I used to go digging in record stores looking for these tracks--at places like Rock and Soul and Satellite. But I've never found them. Once in a while you can sing a part of a tune to the guru in the shop and they'll retrieve it from memory. I've done that a few times with success. But these 2 tracks keep eluding me. And I was thinking, besides searching for playlists or looking for compilations of music played in that era (early 90s) and place (NYC), it is really difficult to search for aural content without lyrics. Believe me, I know how to search and research, but this one I can't figure out and I think it is one of those cases where an expert is more valuable than a machine at retrieving the information.
In any case, the search goes on. I'm not ambitious enough to really look for a person to point me in the right direction. The search has just become a sort of hobby of mine. "Oooh," I'll say. "A 12" shop. Maybe I'll just duck in for a few minutes to dig." It's kind of like that movie "Serendipity", where John Cusack has to look in used book stores constantly to find that book with Kate Beckinsale's number in it, Love in the Time of Cholera. That's me, except I'm not looking for my soul mate. I'm just trying to compile the soundtrack of my life. I have playlists that act like diaries in a way, and I'm obsessed with finding this because it's like a significant piece of my teen years is missing. It's all just memories.
Comments
11/09/07 @ 16:26
When seeing your post I recalled a Dr. Dobbs article outlining a project at the University of Michigan which does just what you ask. Apparently the project created an iTunes plugin, but I haven't seen or heard anything else about it since the article was published. Not sure if the software's been distributed.
Their approach converted melodies to simple midi tracks and stored them for comparison. To search, a user hums into a mic, the input is converted to midi and compared against tracks in the database. The limitations are the completeness of the midi database whether you can hum in key and on tempo :-)
The original article is at http://www.ddj.com/database/184405434
Good luck!
http://2tbsp.com
11/12/07 @ 10:49
Wow! Thanks for tipping me to that. Sounds brilliant. I'd love to use a tool like that for audio search. It's like the auditory analog of searching for image by image content.
02/21/08 @ 15:47
yup, sounds great for audio search.
05/29/08 @ 05:14
"Their approach converted melodies to simple midi tracks and stored them for comparison. To search, a user hums into a mic, the input is converted to midi and compared against tracks in the database. The limitations are the completeness of the midi database whether you can hum in key and on tempo"
Now with techno, trance and minimal this approch will not help
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