If you’ve ever spent way too much time trying to identify a song stuck in your head (admit it - you have!), try pointing your browser to SongTapper.com next time. On this easy-to-use site, users can tap out a rhythm on their keyboard and the program will return a list of possible song matches. The site claims to already recognize over 71,000 songs, and each time a user taps a song that is not identified correctly, they can submit the title and/or artist to help train the program. You can even listen to a playback of the tune you tapped. The site includes a video example of how to tap out “Jingle Bells,” and users can browse through all songs in the database or check out lists of the most popular or most recent searches. The program is not difficult to use, even without watching the video example, but you must tap at least ten notes to perform a search.
A few test runs found the accuracy of results to be fairly inconsistent. SongTapper correctly identified my renditions of Jingle Bells and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” on the first try, but it took two attempts to recognize “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson, and could not identify “Summer Lovin’” from the Grease Soundtrack or several other tunes that I tapped, even after numerous attempts.