There’s “The Song Tapper” (http://www.songtapper.com/) which lets you tap out the rhythm, but it failed on the few I gave it (it arguably has a bent to more modern songs, though). If it had a bigger repertoire, or allowed you to set the genre or approximate decade of the song, it might be handier.

There are services like Shazam (http://www.shazam.com/) which can supposedly do clips, but they are mobile phone-based.

I ran across a few others that sounded promising on the surface, but actually just did things like correlate ID3 tags. There may be more out there, but a more thorough search would be in order :)

Getting back to the original question though – how do you find music based on the music itself? In this case, the few lyrics were (fortunately) enough, but imagine trying to locate that nice piece of classical music played on CBC a couple of weeks back…

I found a hit for one of the lines on http://malung-tv-news. blogspot. com/2005_03_01_malung-tv-news_archive.html - they identify the song as coming from The Cardiacs, but they don’t say which song.

A search of [cardiacs lyrics “its own phone"] gave me this solitary page: http://www.death.plus.com/cardiacs/lyrics/seasidelyrics.htm

It identifies the song as “Is This The Life?”

Searching on [cardiacs “is this the life?"] got me this link on YouTube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=mUDLA1LAzDo&mode=related&search=

I find it interesting how many angles are sometimes required with Google searches. I restored an addition thirty-odd postings, but a few of them stubbornly refused to appear, even with the site: specifier in front. My blog entry about Zuerich was especially trenchant. It didn’t appear in the site: query, but it did appear if I just took select phrases out of the first paragraph and put them in without specifying the site. The cached page for that was broken (so close, yet so far!), but changing the phrase used, then asking for ‘more results from nimblebrain.net’, then getting the cache from the second entry finally got me what I was looking for.