This little project might not be as easy as they think it's going to be. When they finally assemble a data-base large enough to be anywhere near useful to anybody, I think they'll find that a half-dozen notes or a few rhythmic taps will come back with as many hits as if you were to type "sex" into the window of google.com (believe it or not, I haven't done it, but I think you get my point).

I recall a television show that Leonard Bernstein did several decades ago explaining music to kids. I learned a lot from that program. One whole hour was devoted to the opening four notes of How Dry I Am (in the key of C for example, G C D E). Vary the rhythm a bit and you can come up with hundreds of classical pieces that start with those same four notes.

Give yourself an interesting exercise, and see how many folk song tunes you can think of that start that same way. Here's one right off -- not a folk song, but sung by a lot of folksingers -- Plaisir d'Amour or The Joys of Love. Here's a folk song: Down it the Valley. Or Barbara Allen (tune sung by Burl Ives, Richard Dyer-Bennet, and lots of others). Off you go now. . . .

It would be nice if they can actually develop something useful, but I'm kinda skeptical.

Don Firth