What’s that song? You know, the one that’s playing in your head that you can’t remember the words to? It’s bothering you now, and you can’t quite put your finger on it. Sure, you could probably hum a few bars, but what good is that going to do?

Well, go over to The Song Tapper and see if you can find it. You have to have Flash for it to work, but basically, you just tap the beat of the song with your keyboard. It measures the keypresses and the length between them, and identifies the songs that fit the pattern.

You can also submit songs that fit a certain pattern, to add to the database.

It’s not perfect, but it does work. I tried several songs, and it found them all. There’s also a short video on how to use it. It looks like this site is getting a lot of attention, and it takes a long time to get the results back. Still, it’s pretty neat.

Educational uses? That might be a stretch. I can see using it to find songs that have similar beats in them. I tried tapping the Morse code for SOS in to see what it would do (I’m still waiting for search results). You could look at the works of different composers to see how they influence one another, though I think I’d recommend listening to the actual songs to do that. How else could it be used?