In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new kind of internet search engine in town, brought to us by the same scientist who gave us Wolfram Tones. WolframAlpha is a lot of things, but it’s essentially a semantic or knowledge engine linked to terabytes worth of hand-picked and tagged data. You enter search queries that require some kind of computation, and it interprets what you’re asking for and displays information, like comparing two stocks, or exchange rates, or whatever.

So who gives a crap, right? Wrong!

When I heard about WolframAlpha.com, I was skeptical. After all, I’ve been around the block a few times, seen a few things. I decided to test it with something a little obscure, like if it could spell an E# Lydian dominant scale. Now, a scale like that could trip up even some theory weanies, so I was pretty sure WolframAlpha wouldn’t get it. Yeah, well, it did. It knew that the more standard way to title this scale is using an ‘F’ and that it’s also called the Overtone scale, among other things.

I was, however, able to trip it up by asking for E## Major (that’s E double-sharp). Sure, yeah, okay, it’s perhaps not that surprising that it didn’t get that one, except that I spent a lot of hours spelling scales like that in music school!

So, the next time you need the notes of a scale or can’t remember if a Cmin6 uses a natural or minor 6th (it uses a minor 6th), try WolframAlpha.com.