Songtapper is an addictive new tool that lets you find songs by tapping the melody using your spacebar. You begin by tapping in the song you are looking for. the site returns a set of matching songs. If the song is not in the results, you can teach the system by entering in the song details.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Songtapper matched my attempts at “In A Gada Da Vida”, “Smoke on the Water”, “Alabama Song”, and the “Imperial March (Darth Vaders Theme)”. Results were much better for songs that are slower and have very distinct melodies and it helps to hum or sing while tapping. Even when results don’t match it is sometimes very interesting to see the resulting song list.

The site isn’t much to look at and could use some better information architecture and layout. Result pages link you to lyrics and ringtones but for some reason don’t provide links to buy songs at iTunes, Amazon, etc. Getting a non-match is much more common than a match but since the system is set up to learn from users, it will hopefully only get better with time.