Looking for Chords of a Song? Meet Chordify

"Talking about covers, whether visually or sonically, if a particular combination of notes struck a chord in your heart in a way that you want to be a part of it by covering  that song, then there is nothing wrong with it." - Ville Valo

A couple of days ago, while surfing the net, I found out an interesting site chordify.net which I thought is worth sharing with the people who are interested in music. So what is Chordify all about?

What is Chordify?

Chordify is a web application that transforms the music from Youtube, SoundCloud or any uploaded music file into chords. Sounds interesting!!. The first thing that might pop into your head is "Any Song", and the answer is "yes" any song that you upload, chordify will display the chords for that song. The online music service automatically recognizes chords from the audio signal, and aligns them to the music in simple and intuitive player.

Chordify Origin and Popularity

The website is an outcome of a PHD research by Haas, W.B. de. After his PhD research on music information retrieval, Bas did not want his work to get lost in a dusty closet with other PhD theses. He decided his chord recognition algorithm was almost good enough for public use, so he brought together a group of other music enthusiasts to create Chordify. Chordify is the handiwork of 5 guys from Netherlands and UK. They started work on this on October 2012. The website seems to be rapidly gaining popularity. In less than 2 years of its operation, it has already reached among the top 35000 websites in the world.

Sleek Interface

The user interface for the website looks very simple and easy to use, however the website uses state of the art web development techniques made for and by music enthusiasts. When I tried a song the chords were pretty accurate. The relevant chord is highlighted on the screen and moves inline as the song progresses. If you want to learn only some specific parts, you can click any part and it takes you automatically to that part of the song be it chorus or bridge. All thanks to the modern technology that now one can learn the chords for the song that we like in one click.

Things to improve

As the output is solely based on the automatic recognition of the audio signal, how accurate is the output generated from Chordify. The website is in its initial phase and it doesn't display any chord variants other than Major and Minor. The time signature shows 4/4 and for the songs with different time signatures, it doesn't really work out as the song is still divided in fours while showing irregular beats. In terms of accuracy, this app is better suited to simple songs rather than riff laden  and solo centric songs. The website is improving the chord recognition quality, however automatic chord transcription is a hard problem in general, and the developers are working to improve it. Hope we will get to see a advanced form of chordify sooner than later.

For all the people who are interested in getting the chords for the songs they like, this is a site that can be really helpful. If you find the website helpful for you, please comment below.