4-30-13 What's that Song?!?

[Niveous]

Happy National Honesty Day

QotD: Do you have a song in your music library that you just can't place?

Here's what I mean by that question. Today, i'm going through old mix CD's and I'm finding some songs that I used to enjoy almost a decade ago. The problem is that these CD's have no markers telling me which song is which and by who. Sometimes the memory comes back to me instantly ("hey, that's Pray For Mojo's live version of 'Bad Attraction', I haven't heard that in forever!"), sometimes i have to do research ("holy crap, the only reference to this song's existence is on a tripod page!"), and then there are some that I am stuck on. For instance, I found a song called "Chiaroscuro", bass heavy, kinda darkwave, mostly spoken word. I can decipher the lyrics but the trail isn't leading me to the artist. Knowing me, I'm going to hunt down the song's origin like it's the f'n holy grail.

[frankie big face]

This happens to me a lot with classical melodies. I'll hear something really familiar and then go mad trying to figure out where it came from. Most of the time, it's from some piano concerto or something with a nondescript title.

[JonPorobil]

QotD: I had a set of lyrics in my inbox once that I'm pretty sure you wrote, Niveous, but I didn't remember making any plans to collaborate or anything. I wanted to use those words, but alas, they got lost when oursongs.org got shuttered and I didn't have them backed up anywhere else.

I also have a lot of poorly-labeled untagged mp3s on my hard drive, but many of them are things I indiscriminately downloaded from file sharing networks when I was in high school and college, so I'm sure a simple SoundHound search would solve those mysteries. I'm just too lazy to bother.

[fluffy]

For MP3s etc. you can use MusicBrainz to try to figure it out, and if that doesn't work there's always SoundHound or Shazam.

And yes I have a lot of untagged music that's so obscure that none of the above know what it is either.

[roymond]

Back in the Napster days I got really into Indian pop music and Bollywood tunes. You couldn't buy them here very easily and much of it wasn't available anyway. Years later when I was working at ASCAP a tester on my team heard some music I was playing at my desk and told me his uncle was AR Rahman, which first blew me away. Then I got totally suspicious...until he produced photos of him with Rahman at family gatherings and such. He gave me a bunch of his music and so I learned that about 30 of the tunes I had were his.

[Niveous]

Music Brainz didn't work in my hunt. Neither did Sound Hound (though that's a nifty little program). But I did some hunting around YouTube and finally stumbled across the answer. "Chiaroscuro" by the Cold War.Now to go hunting through some more old CDs.