Wolfram Alpha
May 18th, 2009 Posted in music
The geekier amongst you may have been aware of the latest please-oh-please competitor to Google being released last Friday. It’s called Wolfram Alpha, and it’s actually pretty clever — it’s got a little search niche all to itself. The idea is that it’s an interface to organized data, instead of just an interface to a bunch of other webpages. That means you can do queries like: “Wisconsin median household income / musician salary” or “calories in 1 bowl of corn flakes + a glass of OJ” or “probability full house“. And tonnes of other stuff.
Some of my favorite tools are the music ones, since (as I’ve harped on about before) I don’t have a music education, but love trying to understand formal structures and intervals and such. It lets you work out:
- Properties of notes – e.g. “F#“
- Intervals – e.g. “7 semitones“
- Scales – e.g. “E blues phrygian“
- Chords – e.g. “C major seven“
All of these produce cute little diagrams of piano keys, along with other miscellaneous information.
You can also search for composers and get a little timeline, but that isn’t terribly impressive right now. It seems pretty clueless about pieces as well: Beethoven’s 5th give you info about the (horrible) movie, for example.
Does anyone have any more musical searches which work out nicely?
Tags: music, wolfram Alpha