How Do You Reverse Engineer A Song?

How do you learn to play an instrument, or to make the question even simpler, how do you learn to play a new song you just discovered? Maybe chord charts if it's popular enough, maybe dozens of web searches, but more likely you're stuck trying to figure the song out on your own. Since software is continually improving to the point of being able to auto–detect chords from any song in your iTunes library, there are new options available. Billed as the main new feature, the Mac app Capo 3 automatically extracts chords, as well as tries to be a musician's reverse–engineering toolkit by relying on computing power and plenty of code.

The flip side to using machines and offering a magical experience––if it works and a terrible one if it doesn't––is human power to reverse engineer songs. Soundslice doesn't currently use any algorithms to pick out chords like Capo, instead the company is building tools and interface elements to help users more easily annotate the music as well as share it. So which is the better way to dissect a song to learn its parts?

"Capo aims to be a tool that unapologetically goes out there and gives you a fighting chance of filling in the blanks," says Capo developer Chris Liscio. The program actually started off as a way for users to slow down the speed of songs without changing the pitch, a key feature to learning to play a song by ear. The second version added chord detection, but only visual cues, so the user still had tell the program what note was being played. In the latest version just released, Capo continues to pursue a brute force type method of trying to automatically detect and display the chords on top of the app's unique spectrograph.

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