What song information?

[3GP]

Hi,
  I've been playing Audio Surf for a while. Great game. The concept has inspired me for my final year project. However, the project is not a game, just something that finds similar songs. I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, so apologies if it's not. My question is how would I go about generating a 'signature' for a song. i.e. what information do I need to extract from a song that will help me identify it? Frequency is a given, but are there other aspects I should extract and how should the frequency data be used?
Thanks for any help.

[Mincus]

I've not looked closely myself at how to do it, but I would imagine you'd need to interpret the data in a similar way to a visualiser.
My suggestion would be to look through the libvisual source code (http://localhost.nl/~synap/libvisual-wiki/index.php/Main_Page and http://sourceforge.net/projects/libvisual/) and go from there.

[fergtm]

I think what you are looking for is called acoustic fingerprint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint). It's not an easy task to implement it but you can find a short introduction in here: http://mtg.upf.edu/files/publications/MMSP-2002-pcano.pdf

[3GP]

Thank you for the replies. I'm planning on using FMOD, as I already have some experience with that, but I'll take a look at the links for ideas. I can obtain the frequency, but I'm sure there are things I should be doing with the frequency data as well as aspects other than the frequency.
Thanks again for the help.