Software can name that tune – it's a humdinger

It's enough to drive you mad. You get a tune in your head and hum it all day yet you've no idea where it came from or who sung it. After a day and a a half, you subject friends and workmates and they don't know either but suffer the same fate. The only solution is to track down the bloke-that-knows-about-music, who you haven't spoken too since last time this happened. Well, those days are over, or so reckon some boffins in Paris. They have devised some software that can listen to tone-deaf idiots like you and me and then, through trial and error, find the tune you're after. Called Melodiscov, the inventors reckon music stores will snap it up. The Reg says: Not bloody likely, mate. First of all, people can't hum, moan or sing in tune - that's why we have singers. Plus, our memory of music is rubbish, the awful noise you make often has very little to do with the original. How a machine with a relatively limited selection in its memory is ever going to overcome these obstacles is anyone's guess. Even worse than this: what if one of these machines actually makes it to a record store. People will believe that if they sing long or hard enough, the computer will find it. It won't and it won't be the computer's fault, but that won't stop the relentless caterwauling. Is it good business to have someone repeating the same phrase over and over again in a record store (yes, if it's a dance music store)? Is it humane?